Bright lit: the great cedar forest,
Cathedral dome skies bright sunlit above…
All of a fulgent blue, all of an azure glow…
Everywhere, the peace of a radiant sunlight

Worlds of magic and a most sacred light
Bright sunlit day, bright shafts 
Through a portico of treetops high above
The trees reaching so very high,
Deep into the sheltering skies

Snow decked branch and bough: gently swaying memory;
Movement into the swaying winter winds
The gentle whispers, the gentle sighs 
The treetops,
Their  song, their gentle touch, their toss, their glide

A deepest silence, a most profound contemplation
Midst snowdrift and snowlit mists as they shift
Between icy branch and snow covered green bough

Dust of snow and cedar lights:
All the ethereal wonders of a snowy day, 
The snow blessed, lost ephemeral lands
In a full clothed beauty, snowy wonders: of sunlight, of shadow

Oh! sacred forest, this great beauty of place
To overwhelm, to protect, to shelter…
Here, a deepest meditation, a deepest circumspection…
Snow and ice and all the wonder of a  glorious sunlit day
All the ephemeral beauty in a winter’s sunlight world.

Bev Gorbet is a Toronto poet and retired school teacher. She has published several poems with the Retired Teachers Organization and most recently in “Literary Connection IV: Then and Now” (In Our Words Inc., 2019), edited by Cheryl Antao Xavier.