Tuesday Poem - Winter Light
Horizontal light
laid in long bars
across the russeting slope
reveals
the contours of the land
the fierce geography of rock
the patterning of sheep through bracken
lipped water-marks on sand
The mountain’s shadow
bruises the lake.
The cold is like loss:
a cramping hold on bone
muscle, thought,
spilling in from the east.
The air tastes metallic
like snow dissolving on the tongue.
This is the death month
December's Druid alphabet
that signified
the rebirth of the spirit.
An ash tree clumsy with unshed seeds,
a deer’s teeth grooved on the bark
a snowdrop spiking up through a dead leaf
And then the falling sun herds
the rocks into the long shadow
of winter night.
Feeling very wintry here in the north of England with temperatures diving below -15 at night and lots of snow and ice. The poem is only a series of observations really - I need to do more work on it. The photograph is of ice crystals on glass with the sun behind - taken this morning outside my office.
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Kathleen, I love this, both its strong foothold in reality (the series of observations) juxtaposed with the mythic elements that to me weave it into poetry, that 'something more' that infuses haiku, for example. And lines like:
ReplyDelete"The mountain’s shadow
bruises the lake"
make me shiver: I can definitely see it.
I really like the photo, too.
Magic
ReplyDeleteLovely.
ReplyDeleteI'm shivering in sympathy.
the mountain's shadow
bruises the lake
I can see it, lovely.
ha ha,
ReplyDeletebefore you accuse me of plagiarising Helen, I just glanced at the other comments now and saw she wrote almost the same thing!
Some lovely moments in this poem, and yes, even here in the warm summer evening it's enough to make the teeth ache (see avoided the popular shiver :) beautiful.
ReplyDeleteAh! I posted a wintery snow-filled poem this week, too! What synchronicity. The desolation and bleakness of landscape in this poem is utterly striking, Kathleen. I love the line 'The cold is like loss'. Thanks for posting!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your feedback everyone. I've been editing the poem since I posted it - strange how the act of publication makes you see things differently - and I've altered some of the line breaks and changed the wording slightly. But I've kept the lines you liked just the same.
ReplyDeletehow wonderful here is
ReplyDelete...
the fierce geography of rock...
and also your evocation of the fissures of good and bad experiencces of the deep cold
and also the sense here of a poem evolving and modifying itself on the post before us
wx