One winter's morn when trees stood stark and bare,
Old Father Wind began to stir from sleep.
He sighed a bracing breath that swirled the air,
a bitter blast of cold so biting deep.

This glacial gust held all in his firm grasp
and cast upon the world a frigid pall.
Each one who breathed its iciness did gasp
and feel an overpow'ring sense of gall.

Felicity, a fairy of this realm,
was not a sprite to let her world turn bleak.
While most allowed this freeze to overwhelm,
she knew that she a magic spell must seek.

Before the Queen of Fairyland she bowed
to plead her Royal Lady intercede,
"Your Highness, please do not this fate allow.
Abandon not your subjects in grave need."

"Felicity, my child, despair no more.
Your woes dispelled with one wave of my wand.
Where bare and barren landscape lay before,
pure beauty you'll behold both near and yon."

Her sparkling fairy dust chilled by the cold
formed into flakes of six-fold symmetry.
Their crystal whiteness one could not behold
without a sense of marveled mystery.

Each fern-like flake was peerlessly unique,
with radiating patterns nonpareil,
until they landed on the ground so deep
they formed a dazzling mantle where they fell.

This winter wonderland from gloom had grown
because of one who never lost belief.
Icicles glisten when the wind has blown
and hang from branches when they bear no leaf.