Today I am publishing my poem “Winter in Reverse.” This poem takes its inspiration from a previous poem that I wrote about autumn last October entitled “Autumn in Reverse”. Autumn in Reverse actually started out as a piece written for a psychology class assignment on memory. Our assignment was to write a story, poem, or other short work of exactly fifty words for others to read and see how many words they could recall after two minutes of reading it. Each student had to read someone else’s work in addition to writing their own piece.

Being me, I couldn’t just write something boring, so I tried to come up with something interesting, something unique. In the processing of drafting, I came up with the idea of describing the changing weather in an usual way. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether my classmates would have a harder time remembering the words to the poem because of how counterintuitive the poem would be or whether they would remember more because of the unusual images in lines such as “Liquid roses fall upon the raindrops” or “Pedestrians over the heads of umbrellas.” I considered calling the poem Autumn Backwards but kept the name as is. In fact, the name of my website comes from the first line of “Autumn in Reverse.”

As for “Winter in Reverse,” I, amusingly, wrote this poem while sitting in class at college—in a grammar class no less. I sporadically drafted it over a period of just more than a month. Since I found the class remarkably easy, writing my poem was a way of keeping myself engaged during the lecture whenever I knew the topic at hand well.

Sometime this year I decided that I wanted to write similar poems for each season of the year and release each near or during the season it spoke of; thus “Winter in Reverse” is intended to be the first of three planned poems to accompany “Autumn in Reverse.” I hope you enjoy it and the illustration I made to accompany it.