Winter Solstice

A poem, OK, with some rambling fore n aft but for pleasure, rather than some intense Post-grad dismemberment

I had been gazing from the back bedroom window over the snowbound garden and adjoining park. How nice, an adjoining park - but we have no gateway (which would have traversed a beck were the council not so ****ing hell-bent on piping all natural waterways ‘to avoid flooding’ - which of course occurs more because there’s nowhere for the run off to go, all the natural watercourses have been piped). And there’s no gate because when we moved here, there was tall security fencing to prevent ingress of scroats from said park. I say park…

Anyway, I gazed (goze?) past the silver birch whose golden leaves were long since fallen, like dubloons. The sky was a blue grey, and in the middle distance a raven cawed sadly - ordinarily really, its tone seeming to fit the bleak scene. I’d been trying for months to write something about ‘wounded crow’ cos I thought it sounded Duesy, but failed. In the few seconds before I turned the file below into a jpeg (centre align!!!!) I sort of wove it in differently but meaningfully re the wounds, completing a poem I’d been slightly unsure about heretofore. As I goze, thoughts of the solstice crossed my mind and how I like to mark such things, though going out in the cold and/or dark are too rough for me generally.

And I’d also been contemplating ‘Punch’ magazine. Witty, peculiar and what I read in art class at my secondary modern as the teacher felt I was ‘quite unable to produce anything artistic’. Such a Punchinello (full name of Mr Punch of the wife-beating puppetry) turncoat is life, regardless of what we try. Might not one have found something, even subLowry, that would pass as characterful, if I’d been allowed (as ‘sub-normal’ children were allowed) to doodle and scrawl absently... The sort of thing people say “I think you’re very brave” when they encounter your purile shoyte. But let’s not sully this page with foulness and stench. Let’s read some poetry…

There. I love the image of the blue orbs - planets aligned that we can but just see as dawn seeps in like ink from a dipped quill. That line about the birch has spent her gold - gosh, that’s where it began to emerge as a poem. I’d been sat on it since our tree of that name was planted on moving in, and lived through it’s first winter here.

Sledge slid tears is perhaps part of my new language appearing. The fragment and the grist. You know those smooth traces in the snow where sledges have passed; as the sun warms them they bleed water.

I like the undeveloped negatives of mist. As I’ve discussed with someone somewhere, film - actual celluloid - is fantastic material for creative writing. In fact media, like a flick-book - all make interesting devices.

The thought that all we eat and breath in, all we drink - are elements of the universe passing through us - even a snowflake melting on our tongue. As if to remind us, we came from nought and all that dreary melancholic downer stuff.

Ali and I once saw a moonbow, at Connamara. It was all shades of silver and astonishingly bright, over the coast at Tully Cross. On the way to the pub in the rain. And as any drinking night mind end at infinity, so too this mindful wander ends up in the far far away that the greatest minds on earth haven’t yet explained. If that doesn’t honour an old tradition, a marking of the seasonal calendar created by the formation of this planet, I don’t see how slaughtering a pint of cider does either.