Winter Solstice, 2021

Times are when we feel warmed, saying goodbye.
Our Crow, on her cold branch, caws out, Hello!
Gray-overcast is this, our midday sky.

The rushing moments hesitate, then go
like dear-departeds, ushered down an aisle
where candles barely glow and shadows grow . . .

sent willingly, though sad, in single file.
Storm-scattered branches lay about, with leaves
hard-frozen in the grass. I wait, a while,

to hear what Crow may say. A whirl upheaves,
brings down. Or did, last year. Yet now when I
see sticks and leaves I ask what Crow believes

the darkened yet-to-be may bring our eye.
Hello! she cries. Hello! I cry. Goodbye!

Winter Solstice 2020

We feared that this might be
our longest sleepless night. We feared to see
the Lightning-Bearer and the Crow —
to feel flames feed on our old failing, oaken strength —
to hear the haunting laugh at our unsilent
blight of madness in a Mammon-blasted land.

Why not just call them Kings, come from afar,
these Two? The Old, the New.
The Two have reconciled themselves to meeting
after centuries of wheeling down
the lines of distant spheres — have reconciled themselves
to putting past the memory, the blame,
if but for one brief Earthly day:

For one was Lord, once, and, asleep, castrated
by the second one, his own goat-suckled Son.
Old Jupiter and Saturn.
Older Zeus and Cronus.

Fire-blistered stands the oak, and severed
falls the mistletoe. The oldest Crow
of all of last year calls
to be reborn the Crow of all of next.

Conjunction, as they call it.
Just to human eyes, we know. Alignment,
glimpsed at gloaming from a waning world defiled
by her own troubled child.

How small, our traveled spheres! And yet they touch
the one upon the other. And they stretch
as far as sight may reach —
not that our eyes see light afar, this night.
The clouds, here, close off every King and sphere and star
despite our knowing just how long they planned
on meeting right there where they are.

We feared that this might be
a night immersed in deeper woe than what is here,
this windy, starless solstice night.
We must not rest, and yet it is that all the same
we know that we must sleep to dream ourselves
from where we were to what must be —
from here to farther where conjoining spheres
hold our enclosing but expanding ways,
our circle-tracing and yet interweaving days.

The oldest Crow of all: we never see
but only hear her. Over years
she calls, to this small night of ours —
then leaves us to our joys, and to our fears.

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 . . .

Full Moon, Winter Solstice

Well must you know: what song are you? —— calls midnight
Crow. Though Solstice eve may lay day low,
dusk brings serene Selene to Moonmost glow.
Benighted, quieted: all things (amid light

growing, echoing occluded Sun)
melodically dispel their glooms —— despite
day's lengthiest night-muting. Full Moon's height
re-echoes off the Soul —— that Silent One,

of Many. Look, now, down this open well.
The deep shades, rounded, hush appearances
to singleness: all shapes, all distances.
But soon midnight's Moon-echoes, there, will swell
to carol in the year! Your Christmasses
are Solstices to me —— as you know well.

Grapevines, Winter Solstice

Branchings and runners fall shorter,
as short as they ever will be;
they fall to gloved hand and clipper
on winter solstice day.

Thickest trunks stay, rising through snow.
Thinnest vinings from the longest
of days, that bore greenest of growth,
fall, now days are shortest.

Oh, our summer seemed so endless
when countless thoughts clustered to mind —
although some vines would stand fruitless,
and many plans would end,

brought short by the trimming of hours;
and now celebrants trim yule trees,
and dwell with a sigh on past years
and long-gone solstice days.

I cut them short as they will be,
all year, these runners and branchings,
and hope that the shrinking of day
and dim thoughts of endings

will yield to times when even Time
will grow, granting days that will be
longer, when greening thoughts will climb
higher, nearer the sky —

at least along wires that we string
across land, across snow, to hold
such hopes. A solstice day must bring
something new, something old —

or bring short the old to unfold
into the new. Who can foresee
what one short day's trimming will yield,
this winter solstice day?