Go ahead. Ask me.
Winter is the best time
to find out who you are.
Quiet, contemplation time,
away from the rushing world,
cold time, dark time, holed-up
pulled-in time and space
to see that inner landscape,
that place hidden and within.
from While We’ve Still Got Feet
On a clear winter’s evening
The crescent moon
And the round squirrels’ nest
In the bare oak
Are equal planets.
by Anne Porter,
If day after day I was caught inside
this muffle and hush
I would notice how birches
move with a lovely hum of spirits,
how falling snow is a privacy
warm as the space for sleeping,
how radiant snow is a dream
like leaving behind the body
and rising into that luminous place
where sometimes you meet
the people you’ve lost. How
silver branches scrawl their names
in tangled script against the white.
How the curves and cheekbones
of all my loved ones appear
in the polished marble of drifts.
by Kirsten Dierking
via http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/12/15
THE WHITE
These are the moments
before snow, whole weeks before.
The rehearsals of milky November,
cloud constructions
when a warm day
lowers a drift of light
through the leafless angles
of the trees lining the streets.
Green is gone,
gold is gone.
The blue sky is
the clairvoyance of snow.
There is night
and a moon
but these facts
force the hand of the season:
from that black sky
the real and cold white
will begin to emerge.
by Patricia Hampl
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase.
You lift…
Poetry Pairing matches Billy Collins’s “Winter Syntax” with an audio slideshow by Keith Mulvihill in which a reporter, photographer and mountaineer together navigate the snowy Tuckerman Ravine Trail along the Presidential Range in New Hampshire.
The wind is blowing tonight like it is winter.
(Andrew Wyeth, 1942, Watercolor on paper)
(Source: birdsong217)
