Out of Season

Revisiting past brumal season / 
With temperatures far below freezing; /
Some close illustrations /
Of precipitation /
With metaphors pushed beyond reason.  

I often post “out of season” poems here with respect to the spring, since my routine of revisiting the NaPoWriMo routine often means that I am posting about the start of April in the start of fall semester.  This eclectic-summer post will consider a less common juxtaposition: revisiting Winter 2026, when the snowfall and the cold temperatures were more dramatic than in much of the past decade.

“Revisiting past brumal season / 
With temperatures far below freezing…” 

This is not a chem-themed limerick so likely does not need much in the way of translation!  One synonym for “wintry” is “brumal,” and this particular winter season had much consistently colder temperatures than the last several. 

“Some close illustrations / Of precipitation…”

The extreme weather yielded some particularly interesting photos of snow and ice, over January and February.          

“With metaphors pushed beyond reason.” 

I had drafted a different poem back after the worst January snowstorm, based entirely on rhymes for “winter” that were coming to mind (as I frustratedly excavated my car for the morning commute!):

“The nearby path, a wintered pass / As pond suggests near-sintered glass./ Car rests beneath snow’s splintered mass. / The morning’s goal: get into class.”  

This verse arose from rhymes first, and then I considered the actual context later.  The sintered-glass funnel cited above is a piece of equipment I know from labwork; the pond had certainly been glassy in its appearance, but “sintered” did not particularly apply.  Likewise, the “splintered mass” of snow and ice was relatively straightforward to deal with, given enough time and patience.  The metaphors were “pushed beyond reason” in commemorating the winter weather.