Day 7: Winter Bites

This poem is by Jane Dougherty, who blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/. Jane was a massive inspiration and support to me when I started blogging my poems, and is still one of my favourite poets. She has written a number of young adult fantasy books, and her poetry collection – Thicker than Water is available here:LINK CO.UKHTTPS://TINYURL.COM/Y2ET7DCR
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Winter night

Light’s spilling from the window,
warm as gingerbread,
sticky as love.
Light’s spilling from the window
and I pause here for a moment,
between the dark blue night and
the light spilling from the window,
warm as gingerbread.

In December, we triolet. Another triolet, unrhymed, unrhythmed, stretched and bent, but still recognisable.

Day 9: winter woodland

now is the time to explore you
in misty light so low
you become one inky shadow

birch, ash, beech and oak let go
of leafy glamour long ago
abandoning piles of copper and gold

now your copses are barefaced and bold
your glimmering gnarly branches hold
mulchy aromas of moss and fungus

I long to see you bathing languorous
in myrrhy moon and silver scent of stars

come and explore me
in this misty light so low
be embraced by my inky shadow

my trees have all let go
their leafy glamour long ago
abandoned it in piles of copper and gold

my copses are barefaced and bold
my glimmering gnarly branches hold
clouds of moss and fungus

come, see me bathe languorous
in myrrh of moon and silver-scented stars

A little wintry magic from Kim Russell. Kim M. Russell has been writing poetry and short stories since she was a schoolgirl but only began submitting to competitions and anthologies when she retired from teaching in 2014. Her poems have been published on-line by Visual Verse and The Ekphrastic Review, among others, and in print by: Afflatus Magazine, River Writes (Bure Navigation Conservation Trust), Anthology of Aunts and Second Place Rosette (Emma Press), Chiaroscuro – Darkness and Light (dVerse Anthology 2017), Peeking Cat Anthologies 2017 and 2018, and Field Work (UEA Publishing Project with Kunsthalle Cromer). She lives in the UK, in East Anglia between the North Sea coast and the Norfolk Broads, with her husband and two cats.

Kim has written two books, a flash fiction collection: Between Heartbeats and a children’s book: Joe and Nelly. They’d both make ideal stocking fillers…

Winter – poem for dVerse

From leaf-shed
to new growth –

we are seeing out
the winter.

Sun-starved, we hanker
after light,

hoarding up pale moments
of beauty –

the scratch of twigs against
the sky,

the bleached petals of
the sunset,

the red haze growth of
witch hazel

and we yearn.

Oh, we yearn.

Lillian is hosting at dVerse tonight, asking us to shed our inhibitions, and our coats, and settle down to some writing. We are riffing on the word “shed”. Join us.

Winter afternoon – a poem for dVerse

The sky is a piece of paper,
crumpled and smoothed out
by grubby hands, smeared
with grey, mottled by time

all meaning rubbed away

the gull is a blade,
slicing through the air,
each feather sharpened
by the wind, each turn
drawing blood

the sky is a dirty
sheet of paper.

the gull is a
feathered blade.

sky
paper
gull
blade

Bjorn is behind the bar at dVerse tonight. It’s a Meet the Bar night, and he’s asked us to think about metaphors. 

I actually think it would be harder for me to write a poem without metaphors, and for it still to be a poem. 

The green chapel

Winter sleeps in a cave in the mountains, on a bed of ice. She creeps in there as the snow melts, and takes her long rest, lulled by birdsong and the scent of green, growing things. She wakes as the leaves fall in showers of gold and red, and emerges, scattering frost around her. She walks under winter skies pierced full of stars, and dances in wild December storms.

If you find the cave, and enter it, you will see her sleeping there, pale as a snowdrop, lips like holly berries, hair as black as the bare branches of the beech tree in January. Don’t wake her – one touch of her white hand will freeze your soul, and leave you bound, another stone sentinel to guard her bedchamber.

For Sue Vincent’s #writephoto prompt.

Solstice

 

“We are all suns”

you said – “Burning

to live, burning to die”.

 

We light candles.

What else can we do?

 

These short days

leave us scrabbling

for light, longing

for the world to tilt,

to throw the sun

a little higher in the sky.

 

We light candles,

burn fires, seek warmth:

there’s an ancient forest

surging through

the house,

all that sunlight stored

in deep darkness, waiting

for us, for millenia.

 

We burn to live.

We burn to die.

 

A rather late solstice poem. Maybe it just works as a winter poem? 

 

The best things in life are free – haibun for dVerse

We’re climbing in the dark, in the snow. There are lights strung along beside us, strings of lights dipping between poles and branches, showing us the way – and of course the snow reflects back the light, so that it seems to be shining all around us. The texture of the snow is like loose sand, and it’s slippery, and hard going. It’s uphill all the way. If we look up we can see the stars, and the shape of a great mountain, craggy, pointing towards the sky. There’s a moon, too, not quite full, tinged with gold. A couple of people have gone past, heading downhill, sliding down on toboggans. Here and then gone a moment later. Our voices hang in the air, in that peculiar silence you get in deep snow. I think it must muffle any echoes, any resonance, leaving only the clear true note of one person calling to another. It’s beautiful here. I want to be here, I love this moment. I have always wanted to be here, to do this, and never known it.

Stars glisten on snow
Moonlight shimmers on mountain
Silence enfolds us

 

Toni at dVerse has given us this lovely prompt. I’m just back from Germany, and a taste of winter – sliding on frozen canals, sledging in the Alps. Back home it’s muddy, and damp, but the daffodils are out and there are snowdrops in all the hedges. 

 

NaPoWriMo 7 – tritina

The River at Evening

This river changes every time I pass
The surface of the river takes the light,
The moon dictates its rising and its fall.

A cloud of birds rise up before they fall
I stand here on the bridge to watch them pass
A single form that’s caught against the light.

Hurrying homewards in the failing light,
They coil and curve, they turn and twist and fall –
Beneath them, all the people move and pass.

And in the fall of light, I pass the river.

This is a very formal structure, and I really struggled with it. I find the subject prompts much easier to work with. Anyhow, I’ve scratched this out somehow, and even though I’m not entirely happy with it I’m going to press “publish” just so I can stop worrying away at it.

Phew.