Poetry

Abstract

In two short weeks, the gruelling cold has come.

My jarring bones cry all night long.

My dreams are searching for a warmer ground

where songbirds and the summer heat are found.

And yet my Advent spirit soars in song

at sloughing off of all that’s worn and wan,

welcomes the astringent cold, the gathering dark.

My attention turns to gaze on flickering sparks

rising from the log in wood-fired stove

that offers its momentary psalm of expiring love:

the rasping shudder and hiss, the youthful blaze

of all its ardent forest life in flames.

Maturing and ageing come to this swift felling:

grain broken open, itself source spelling.

Like a row of toppled trees they lie fallen;

so many brought down in the year’s storms.

The old ones, with withered arms and loosened

roots, whose fall is all the harder for their longevity.

And the young saplings, barely grown into their place

in the earth, ripped up, their tender leaves shivering

with the songs they never got to sing. How bare

the fields seem, shorn of their standing. Our eyes

must accustom to the great gap where the line of them

once stood. Our hands that reached out to grasp

their familiar trunks, stroke their silky leaves,

fall back to our sides, useless. We stand where

they once stood, the ground raw and freshly turned,

cannot replace them, only learn to grow in their place.

My mother kneels at the grate, sweeping ashes.

In the blue and white tiled kitchen, the table is a jumble

of jars, spices, dried fruits. We cluster round,

weighing flour and sugar, cracking eggs, stirring up Sunday.

‘Make a wish,’ she says, as we drop in silver sixpences,

pudding charms wrapped in wax paper: tiny boot, anchor, heart.

Later, when dark has cancelled the outside,

we huddle round the fire, watching some sitcom.

She sits with armfuls of Aran wool, conjuring the next

offering for her offspring. I watched her work silent tears,

fears, hopes, smiles into each one. Mine was sky blue.

I wore it with everything, jeans and summer frocks, all seasons.

No idea where it went, that chunky home knit.

Like a mother’s love, it never wore out.