Tag Archives: winter

Snow and Tears

poetry,


BOY AT THE WINDOW

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a God-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

~ Richard Wilbur

We long for the cool change.

nature, poetry, , ,

Many times in the last week, when Mr. Glad and I have put on our jackets and gone out the front door for a neighborhood walk, we have been confused by the pleasant springtime air, the sun shining down on us. Briefly pleased, then remembering that it all means drought. It’s a year when I can appreciate this Christmas poem.

ADVENT

And there was already light:
A stainless steel glare breaking through the eucalypts;
The sky enamel, cobalt-washed, lapis lazuli blue.

The north wind blew in from the desert:
Drowning in the hot scent of mock orange and ripe mango
We longed for the cool change and the sea breeze.

It was already the longest day:
Why should I await the Light of the World
When I already have a surfeit?

Into the crowded starry midnight,
The neon and electric city festival,
Into the early dawn jangling with birdsong,

Into my summer:
Then came the Christ Child into the brightness
And he was more than the sun.

— Katherine Firth

 

Thanks to Anna of Peacocks and Sunflowers for this poem that can be read with notes on the author’s site.

blackberry wine and a white fence

food and cooking, home, my garden, nature, , , , ,

At various spots in our town and country I’m sure I smell the blackberries turning to wine on their bushes – even as I am driving down the street or road that particular scent of summer-into-fall invades my car. I’ve never noticed it before…it’s probably all kinds of fruits breaking down into soil and earth and giving out their last sweetness on the way.

The sweet olive is blooming at the same time, and I must say, this is almost too much deliciousness to absorb in one day. I roasted pimientos from the garden last night, to loosen their skins, and that filled the house with…what shall I call it…Old Mexico? If Autumn has its special atmosphere, it must include all these ingredients in the recipe. We haven’t initiated the wood fires, and I’m wondering if I put off generating smoke, maybe I can prolong these other more subtle experiences. But pretty soon — maybe tomorrow?! — I will be shivering too much to care about that aspect of the season’s loveliness.

And there is plenty of visual feasting to do, with various plants making their seeds now, or putting out the last blooms, the flowers seeming even brighter in the slanted light. They are brave to emerge into the cold mornings when any day now they might get cut down by Jack Frost.

Echinacea Sombrero Hot Coral

 

October is the best month to plant any kind of peas in our area, and I haven’t had sweet peas in the garden in too long. The excitement of the fall garden is making me feel up to helping the little pea seedlings through the winter, so I went to the nursery to buy some seeds. Look what I found – an Echinacea Sombrero Hot Coral. When Kim at My Field of Dreams found something like this last month I ran to the store to get my own, but found nothing. Is this the name of yours, Kim?

Not all the fall colors are orange. Ground Morning Glory

A few weeks ago we had automatic irrigation installed, in the form of a system of plastic tubes running just under the surface of the ground all over the yard. Little black plastic emitters stick up at various places and cover the soil with a spray of water at whatever time intervals we program into the control panel.

Little fence is in the background near the street.

Not a week had gone by before one emitter very close to the front sidewalk was broken off, so we had the guys return and move that line back a few inches, and Mr. Glad installed pieces of wooden fence with stakes that poke into the ground. The paint was a little thin, so he put another coat over it first. I think it’s cute, and when the plants nearby have grown up bigger the white picket look will complement the foliage and flowers nicely.

This afternoon I’m headed back out to plant that echinacea, and also some stock and snapdragons. I’ll clear the pine needles off the cyclamen and trim the rosemary, and sniff and breathe in all these goodies of my garden.

The Glow from Brief Light

poetry, , , ,

Sally Thomas’s book of poems was published just in time for me to get a copy and read it during Advent. The title is Brief Light: Sonnets and Other Small Poems, and these poems are so illuminating, they fit right in with this season when the Light of the World first shined upon us.

Various sorts of light, or the lack of it, are an important aspect of many of the selections. The title brings to mind wintry light that is brief and thin – and there are several poems for this darker season of the year we have entered, with titles and subjects including Christmas, New Year’s, Advent, frost and snow.

I like the “small poem” aspect of the collection, seeing as I am eternally poetry-challenged and usually put off by the ones with very many stanzas. “Snow Weather” is the shortest in the book, and manages, and partly through its very brevity, to capture a dramatic moment that grabs at my own heart.

Snow Weather

A falcon on a wire
Against the laden sky
Scanned his brown empire
With a black-ice eye.

Nothing beneath him stirred
In that sunless instant,
But my heart, for a keen-eyed bird
Blind to me, or indifferent.

The light that Thomas shines on this event reveals something in her own soul, and searches out even the falcon’s impulses.

Birds abound in the poems: a wren in “Tornado Watch,” and the “Mourning Dove” whose being she “felt in the small of my back/The soft clattering updraft of wings.” But the starlings in “Poem in Advent” are the most glorious. This is the first poem I’ve read about the birds that she so aptly describes in couplets beginning with these:

At twilight the poplars, upright and naked,
Wear starlings like restless leaves. Unafflicted
By the cold, they come and go in noisy shifts,
Filling the trees, free-falling into updrafts….

And going on to relate how the starling flock, though “harbinger of every nightfall,” is not only unafflicted by the cold but is a hopeful reminder to us of where we have come from, and “never mournful.”

This reminds me of the prayer read at every Orthodox Vespers, “Thou appointest the darkness and there was the night.” It was after years of hearing this line that it began to sink into my being that God Himself fills the night that He created, and is to us like the black night into which Thomas’s starlings settle. “Darkness, careful, cups them in its hand.”

The subject matter of the collection ranges far and wide and shows how rich a life is lived by this woman interested in everything. Many poems about children and family, her motherly concerns — and marriage, and depression, boats, a snake, depression. But all with a ray of light revealing the transcendent quality of our existence, the interconnectedness of everything.

This is the first time I’ve been so bold as to review a book of poetry, and I don’t know that I’ve read many such reviews, either. I don’t know where to stop, when most of the poems are a pleasure from the first reading and also promise a greater reward if I will spend more time with them.

But let me mention another one or two: “Introvert” is chilling in its description of forced narcissus, “all sweetness, winter-white” alongside a man’s desire to break into his woman’s inwardness, even to “prise her open, bone from hinging bone….” And “Lamplight” is a favorite of mine so far, in which the poet shares the simple event and startling perspective of looking in instead of out at her bedroom window one night, where

…the room shone privately
As with a happiness, a mystery to me.
I stood outside and wondered at that glow.

There is plenty of wisdom shining from the poems in Brief Light, gifts that will go on giving. I am soaking up the glow.