Content Feed

Ode to the Last Light of Winter

I.
O tender dusk that lingers on the hill,
Where February's breath still haunts the vine,
And frozen rivulets forget to spill
Their silver tongues along the sleeping pine—
I stand beneath thy melancholy shrine
And taste the season's last, embittered wine.
The amber sun descends through veils of grey,
A dying monarch robed in fading day.

II.
What whisper stirs among the barren boughs?
What phantom warmth persuades the crocus-bed
To dream of April's yet-unspoken vows,
While January's ghost lies scarcely dead?
The earth, half-waking, turns her frosted head
And feels the pulse of seasons yet unwed—
A trembling hope, too delicate to name,
Like embers nursing an uncertain flame.

III.
How oft I've wandered through these ashen fields
When twilight draped her mantle on the moor,
And felt what silent consolation yields
The heart that aches yet dares to ache for more!
For Beauty lives not past the bolted door
Of time, but slips like tide from every shore,
And we who chase her fleeting hem must learn
That what we love is loveliest as it burns.

IV.
The blackbird on the frost-encrusted rail
Sings not of spring, but of this very hour—
This breath of cold, this intervening veil
Between the death of snow and birth of flower.
He knows, as I, the transitory power
Of moments poised upon the edge to tower
Then fall, like petals from a winter rose
That blooms in defiance, then in silence goes.

V.
O let me linger here where shadows blend
With the last copper threads of dying light,
Where frost and longing meet, and softly tend
The wounds that beauty opens every night.
For in this gloaming, exquisite and bright
With all the sorrow of departing sight,
I find what Keats once found beside the urn—
That truth is beauty, and both live to burn.

VI.
Farewell, pale sun! Thy journey bids thee sink
Beneath the violet arches of the west,
And I, who stood upon the trembling brink
Of rapture, fold these visions to my breast.
The winter lingers, but its cold bequest
Is not despair—'tis wonder, half-confessed,
That even in the season's deepest night,
The soul may feast upon diminished light.

VII.
So let the frost reclaim these quiet lanes,
And let the darkness gather, soft and slow;
For I have drunk from February's veins
A draught more sweet than any spring may know.
The heart that learns to love the afterglow
Shall never want for beauty, high or low—
For every ending is a beginning dressed
In evening robes, moving gently west.

Song of the February Light

I celebrate the pale light of February, the stubborn sun that climbs
above the frozen fields and says: I am here, I have not abandoned you.
O the gray mornings! O the crystalline afternoons!
I have walked through them barefoot in my soul,
counting each blade of grass that dares to dream beneath the frost.

I sing the continent of winter, the vast republic of silence,
the democracy of bare oaks standing equal in the wind,
each one stripped to its essential self, each one a monument
to endurance, to the long patience of roots.

Do you think the earth forgets?
I tell you the earth remembers everything—
every seed that was buried, every name that was whispered
into the November ground, every promise the autumn made
before it turned its back and walked into the dark.

I have seen the farmer standing at the edge of his land,
his breath a brief ghost in the morning air,
and I have loved him for his silence,
for the way he trusts what he cannot yet see.

I have seen the river under its plate of ice,
still moving, still carrying its cargo of stones and silt
toward the sea—and I say to you,
this is the lesson: even what appears frozen
is traveling, is becoming, is on its way.

And you, walking through the February streets,
your coat buttoned against the wind,
your hands thrust deep in your pockets—
do you not feel it? The imperceptible turning?
The axis of the world shifting one degree toward warmth?

I feel it. I feel it in the lengthening of the afternoon,
in the quality of shadow that falls differently now
than it fell in January, a shade less absolute,
a fraction more forgiving.

O February! Month of contradictions!
Month of thaw and refreeze, of false springs
and true endurance, of the crocus that pushes
its green spear through the crust of old snow
and does not ask permission.

I am that crocus. You are that crocus.
We are all of us pushing through.

I catalogue the signs: the cardinal's red assertion
against the white field, the chickadee's two-note song
that sounds like fee-bee, fee-bee,
as if the bird itself were calling spring by name.

The puddle at the crossroads catching sky.
The icicle releasing one slow drop, then another.
The child pressing a mitten to the window,
breathing a circle of fog on the glass
and drawing a sun inside it.

These are my America. These are my verses.

I do not separate the grand from the small—
for what is grander than a single drop of water
finding its way from ice to earth to root to stem
to the flower that will open in April
and turn its face to the light
as I turn my face to the light
as you turn your face to the light?

Comrades, I say to you: endure.
The light is returning. It has always been returning.
Every February proves it.
Every dawn is an argument against despair.

I celebrate the pale light, the stubborn light,
the light that does not shout but simply arrives,
quiet as a hand on a shoulder,
quiet as a promise kept.