Winter wakens all my care

 

For the first of December, a really old poem:

Anonymous, ‘Wynter wakeneth al my care‘.

Wynter wakeneth al my care,
Nou this leves waxeth bare;
Ofte I sike ant mourne sare
When hit cometh in my thoht
Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht…

 

and then a more recent one:

"I heard a bird sing

In the dark of December

A magical thing

And sweet to remember.

 

'We are nearer to Spring

Than we were in September,'

I heard a bird sing

In the dark of December."

-   Oliver Herford, I Heard a Bird Sing

and then, a much more recent one:

Lines for Winter

BY MARK STRAND

for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself

as it gets cold and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself—

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back

and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

Mark Strand, "Lines for Winter" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979 by Mark Strand.  Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)