It

It stopped working in the winter; panic
spread quickly, and then the first person died.
Panic became hysteria, an uproar
for answers, but we were so used to it
that we forgot how it worked. There was talk
of replacements, rumors of hope, wasted
attempts at a fix, but by winter's end
twelve were lost, and the next winter was worse.

The number of things we relied on it
for kept getting larger, so did the death
count. We stopped keeping track after forty.
Winters seemed to roll right into winters;
the population dwindled; our worry
shifted away from it being broken;
the focus evolved to living without
it. And that's around when the turn began.

The spark came as if to us all at once:
something must have done what it did before
there was it. And so we got to work
on finding the new routes to the old ways.
It wasn't immediate, and winter
seemed endless, but the death toll went back down
to forty in time, and soon enough twelve.
There were much less of us, that may have helped,
because the need for it seemed to lessen--
but then it was spring again. Time to think
about such things was left in the past with
it. Now, we work together for what we need.
Now, we hardly even think about it.