Poetry Friday:Patricia Fargnoli: “Winter Grace”

 Laura Purdie Salas is hosting the roundup at Writing the World for Kids. 

It’s been a winter of solitude, self reflection, and discovery.  Our pastures and woods may have filled up with snow and ice, but I discovered new pathways to skirt around the impassable and that there was a particular satisfaction in trudging through the snow just to be able to see the frozen creek glint and glimmer as it meandered down the valley.  Daylight may have been reduced to a few precious hours, if we were lucky to have been graced with the sun in the first place, but there was a delightful satisfaction in being able to allow early darkness as an invitation to longer hours of reading by the roaring woodstove.

This lovely poem captures  my winter thoughts perfectly:

Patricia Fargnoli: “Winter Grace”

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed-down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.