Frost in Key West

In the poet’s garden a gecko

suns at the edge of a deck

while taps on a typewriter echo

and neighborhood chickens peck.

The typist is busily drafting

verses invoking the flight

of snowflakes airily wafting

through a forest mantled in white.

Unlike the mutable lizard,

the Yankee, wherever he is,

has the hue and warmth of a blizzard,

a winter immutably his.

Alan Sullivan

© ____; originally printed in The Formalist.
Reprinted by permission of the author.