CW Sanders
is a retired attorney living in Oklahoma City OK, currently working as
a legal writer and litigation manager for a number of law firms. He
holds undergraduate degrees in English, history, geography, and
political science in addition to his JD. That’s a lot of schooling,
readers! CW has played amateur baseball, softball, and hockey for most
of his life and has been a high school and college athletic official
since 1972. His writing has been published in College of William and Mary Law Review and
other trade publications. This poem is an unsparing look at the bleak
midwinter. It addresses the frivolities of a month given to
celebrations and frigidity. As you read it, count down with CW and me
the days til winter is but a faded memory.

The optimism of alpha, annual rituals of numeric progression
and resolutions, promises to begin anew,
broken and forgotten like the debris of our material lust,
chattels viewed with ennui, strewn about the abode;
given to expect puerile happiness
until you arrive with regretful markers due and owing.
We celebrate your coming with bubbles in fluted glass,
anticipation, reverie, cheer,
with old acquaintances vowed not to be forgotten.
But your reality quickly tempers joy
with crooked smiles and anticlimax,
like red and green flora now wilting
and parched needles hidden, eager to inflict the unwary.
Your promises of time yet to live, to look ahead with resolve,
to look behind on memories fond is not to be trusted.
Your namesake, two-faced purveyor of hope,
does gaze upon us with derision, four eyes of mirth,
knowing their assurances illusory
as your insinuated thaw.
O January you betray us with a laugh
move on where Cupid’s arrows give not passion, just the shaft.