Winter of winters

Our winter of winters
of lost months and souls
cracked off the calendar
and splintered our lives

Numbing our toes
running our noses
In fur-collared parkas
and snow-powdered mittens
We squinted our eyes, bracing the cold

Past winters passed,
in headreel spun movies and neverland neurons
in Polaroid pictures and Brownie two-tones
in scrawled whitespace writing
Frosted pane memory clues

We escaped other winters
Fugitive and frozen
in our Zhivago ice house

awaiting magnolias

But this Winter of winters

in glaciered twilight blue-tones  

discovered our redoubt

and blew its ice breath  

Our Yuris, our Laras

our poets, our doctors

turned into peasants

Hoping for Tsarists, hiding from Lenin 

Then
off the turreted roof
cast in permafrost iron
broke the Damocles icicle
not waiting for later