Seasons

What follows is a "poetic experiment" for me. I'll leave it to your judgment if it worked or not. It's an attempt to write something in a different way from what I usually do. The poem below is shorter than the poems I usually write; it is compact and more symmetrical. Four stanzas, each of four lines. I have also consciously tried in it to maintain the parallelism of each line in each stanza: the first line naming the season, the second line an attitude of heart, the third line a place/situation usually specific to the season, and the fourth line I will call the "outcome."

This is not a happy poem. It turned out to be a poem about a relationship gone bad. Sorry for that, but this is how the poem came out:


Seasons

In the Spring
In hopefulness and innocence,
We met under blossoming trees
And our hearts opened.

In the Summer
Easing into warm familiarity,
We lay beside the wide river
And we embraced.

In the Autumn
A fissure opening a distance between us,
As the leaves fell and the wind grew cold
And we withdrew.

In the Winter
Hearts now hardened in a freeze,
Was it tears or blood upon the snow
As we assaulted each other?