This Midday Gray (Winter Solstice, 2019)

This midday gray
may stay. Tree-shadows on the snow
have measure and restraint to show
a blinded day,

not like lit snow.
In their blue-tinted, easeful way
they please eyes that might glance away
but for that glow:

for what shows gray
seems poised within the ebb and flow
of yet-to-be and once-was-so.
The shortest day,

snow-brightened though,
goes soonest gray —— though we who say
the shortest truth long for delay.
We let things go ——

or let things stay;
and inward fast or outward slow,
the wind of years will stir, and blow
us all astray;

and to and fro,
within, without, we swing and sway
from shortest to the longest way
from shortest to the longest day ——
from solstice day to solstice day.
To brightest midday's grayest gray
we can but go.


Copyright 2019 Mark Rich

Winter Solstice, 2019

This year I had planned not to inflict upon the world a new solstice poem —— for the process of finishing a poem takes so very long, these days, for me. As some friends of mine know, though, poetry happens. So I have let myself and my life be dominated for a few days by the lines which next I will post here. It aided me that I mistakenly thought yesterday to be the shortest day. Today is half-a-second shorter.

When, these days, I recite last year's winter-solstice poem to myself, by the way, I add a fifteenth line to that no-doubt-somewhat-obscure piece of philosophical humor.

That last line is:

"Know well, know well, know well! Know well, know well!"

A happy Solstice Day to all!

Cheers . . .

The Winter King

The Winter King

You look out on a world now crusted thick
with ice and snow, now that the Winter King
sits on the eastern throne and everything
stops —— caught short, clutched in cold. A con-man's trick

klept him the scepter; social subterfuge
dispatched a knight or two who might have ruled
more justly. Blathering his rude, unschooled
prejudgements —— promising a resort refuge

for the gently taxed well-heeled, he kills
a lady bearing torch in flowing gown ——
perhaps does else, once knife has kissed her down ——
and smiles. To win a test of wills with ills!
Pleased that an ursine purse pulled down this crown
his porcine party wallows in his swills.

(Note that I posted here this poem as "You Look Out on a World," in 2017, thinking it a fair enough draft. I felt the desire, though, to finish it. This month I have done so. Cheers. . . )