It's Still Life

8 Vivaldi’s Winter — L’Inverno (1st Movement)

Prologue for the Deaf Listener:
This project (multi-part) is written with the deaf reader in mind. It translates orchestral movement into embodied language. These words are the sound of cold becoming a lash. Bring on the wind with teeth of glass, biting bare branches into prayers of splinter.

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8 Vivaldi’s L’Inverno — Winter (Final Movement: Legato)

The violence is finished.
Not the cold.

What remains
is the long agreement.

The wind no longer strikes.
It passes.
A hand drawn slowly
across the field.

Your body adjusts
to the note that does not end.
Breath finds a length
it can repeat.
Blood settles
into its winter pace.

There is no triumph here.
Only balance.

Ice holds its shape.
So do you.

Time stops asking questions.
Hours lie down beside each other.
Nothing urges.
Nothing resists.

This is how the season speaks now:
without instruction,
without promise,
without relief.

You are not braced.
You are not waiting.

You have become
a duration the cold can pass through
without breaking.

Winter does not leave you.
It recognises you.

And in that recognition,
something quiet happens:
the body stops counting
and simply
continues.

The End.