Happy Winter Solstice!

 The longest night...

"The edge of the solstice,

the barren darkness,

the wheel.

Nature knows that every cycle

must return to stillness and silence.

That every inhale has an exhale.

That every ending births a beginning.

That the light always returns

to a future beyond imagination."

~ Victoria Erickson

Author, Edge of Wonder

 

Dana O'Driscoll,   Moon and Solstice

At the Solstice

Shaun O'Brien

We say Next time we’ll go away,
But then the winter happens, like a secret

We’ve to keep yet never understand
As daylight turns to cinema once more:

A lustrous darkness deep in ice-age cold,
And the print in need of restoration

Starting to consume itself
With snowfall where no snow is falling now.

Or could it be a cloud of sparrows, dancing
In the bare hedge that this gale of light

Is seeking to uproot? Let it be sparrows, then,
Still dancing in the blazing hedge,

Their tender fury and their fall,
Because it snows, because it burns.

 

 

 

And now the leaves suddenly lose strength.

Decaying towers stand still, lurid, lanes-long,

And seen from landing windows, or the length

Of gardens, rubricate afternoons. New strong

Rain-bearing night-winds come: then

Leaves chase warm buses, speckle statued air,

Pile up in corners, fetch out vague broomed men

Through mists at morning.

                                  And no matter where goes down,

The sallow lapsing drift in fields

Or squares behind hoardings, all men hesitate

Separately, always, seeing another year gone –

Frockcoated gentleman, farmer at his gate,

Villein with mattock, soldiers on their shields,

All silent, watching the winter coming on.

Philip Larkin