Shortness, Darkness, Coldness

" . . . The year
isn't a clear circle or some
dream of a clock but one shadowy
moment after the next. . . ."

Margaret Atwood (b 1939)
from her sequence "Small Poems for the Winter Solstice: #14"
in her book True Stories (p 39)
which also contains her poem "Christmas Carols" (pp 56 - 57)
See also fb / "Winter Vacations"

Solstice

Each year, on the same date, the summer solstice comes.
Consummate light: we plan for it,
the day we tell ourselves
that time is very long indeed, nearly infinite.
And in our reading and writing, preference is given
to the celebratory, the ecstatic.

There is in these rituals something apart from wonder:
there is also a kind of preening,
as though human genius has participated in these arrangements
and we found the results satisfying.

What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.

But tonight we sit in the garden in our canvas chairs
so late into the evening -
why should we look either forward or backwards?
Why should we be forced to remember:
it is in our blood, this knowledge.
Shortness of the days; darkness, coldness of winter.
It is in our blood and bones; it is in our history.
It takes genius to forget these things.

by Louise Gluck (1943 -2023)
from The Seven Ages
more on QK & FN & fb

“This is the solstice, the still point of the sun,
its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking,
where the past lets go and becomes the future."

Margaret Atwood
from her poem "Winter Vacations"