Nox Nivosa

Snowflakes downfloating from the void
Upon my face
Spilth of the silent alchemy employed
In deeps of space
Where viewless everlasting fingers ply
The power whose secret is the mystery
That doth my world encase

Power that with equal ease outshakes
Yon architrave
Of massy stars in heaven and these frail flakes
Earth's floor that pave
Swings the flamed orbs with infinite time for dower
And strews these velvet jewels not an hour
Of sunshine that will brave

Yet of whose clustered crystals none
But speaks the act
Of the hand that steers each ceaseless-wheeling sun
And to whose tact
Fire-wreath and spangled ice alike respond
Thoughts from the void frozen to flower and frond
Divinely all compact
Snowflakes, of pureness unalloyed
That in dark space
Are built, and spilt from out the teeming void
With prodigal grace
Air-quarried temples though you fall scarce-felt
And all your delicate architecture melt
To tears upon my face
I too am such encrystalled breath
In the void planned
And bodied forth to surge of life and death
And as I stand
Beneath this sacramental spilth of snow
Crumbling, you whisper
"Fear thou not to go"
Back to the viewless hand
Thence to be moulded forth again
Through time and space
Till thy imperishable self attain
Such strength and grace
Through endless infinite refinement passed
By the eternal Alchemist that at last
Thou see him face to face