Yule

In this dark December
Gloom comes in behind the dusk
Lingers at dawn with the day's rising.
Daylight, such as it is, stays winter-dim
As the sun scoops the horizon.

Snow and the cold that came with it
Fell like whispers from a lost mythology,
Legendary happenings in the wild forest.

From the south, warm winds came,
Melted the fleeting first snow
And all true remembering.

In the unseasonal black night,
Among the bare trees, dry, brown grass,
Crumpled bracken, rattling seedheads,
Not even frosted, were dried
By a sirocco, far off course.

Somewhere, the world has turned to dust,
Restlessly blown away, an eddy in the desert.

Here, the world
Has only the bones of a winter.
And the story of snow is an imprint
Fogging on photographic film,
An afterimage fading from a dream.
Even the paradigm of snow is obsolete,
An illusion from a time long-dead,
A comforting, festive fiction.

There was an old man once,
A father to that world:
His image appears on baubles,
Caricatured on yellowing pages,
His footprints, not traced in any woods.
The snow they pressed has sublimated
Or hangs unfallen in the clouds
Gone and ghosted into heaven
To the same imagined place
As memory lives in now.

We set fire to the world,
Burned the winter dreams we had of it.

We set fire  to the world
And none of us will ever again feel cold
So urgent it makes the long nights harden
And the stars, piercing pins of light,
Like tiny, brilliant seeds in heaven
Out of which tomorrow
And her seasons
Shine.

© BH 2015

---

And this. An 'In The Bleak Midwinter' for our time. Imagined as if cold were to be banished from our winters. It could happen…

It's not all gloom. Who knows what the stars and the seeds of future seasons might grow for us. If we're good.

For the record. This is also poem 52 for 2015. I've achieved the One Piece A Week. Phew!