Revisionist Poetry – “Before the Snow Claims Evening” – Hints of Sunset, v.3

The sunset does not vanish all at once.

It retreats slowly,
like warmth leaving old hands.

Gold thins to rust.
Rust deepens to wine-dark shadow.
Clouds drift over the sky
like heavy cathedral cloth.

The coming storm announces itself in fragments:
the ache in the wind,
the nervous sway of branches,
the sudden absence of birds.

Snow is already imagined
before it falls.

Inside,
lamplight pools against the windows.
The glass clouds faintly with breath.
Someone pulls a blanket tighter
as if preparing for a long confession.

Outside,
winter gathers its enormous silence.

There is terror in such beauty—
in watching the world slowly erased
into whiteness.

And yet,
beneath the storm’s cold dominion,
something in us grows still enough to hear
the quiet machinery of the soul.

So we wait through the dark,
through the patient language of snow,
trusting that somewhere beyond the buried fields,
morning is preparing its small fire.