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Tag Archives: Poetry

In Love with Autumn
 
When I was in my spring,
I didn’t care for autumn much.
 
The aspen would turn gold
for a week, letting you know
It was time to buckle down
for another hard winter.
 
Now that I’m in it, I’m falling
in love with autumn.
I see differently in its weightless
light, in this clear air.
 
Today I bask in soft forgiveness
of an effortless sun.
 
Today I’m given thankful calm
to savor my life in peace, far-reaching peace,
a balance of light and dark
that has its own sense of humor.
 
Today I feast on harvests of ripe fruit
grown all summer long from blossoms
that fell away in spring.
There are seeds in the fruit I eat.
 
I don’t believe in life eternal.
I know it, like bees know,
who fill cells with honey
for sisters they’ll never …

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I’ve been writing winter solstice poems for close to fifty years. Not every year, but this profound solar event seems to present itself to me over and over as a moment to take seriously, in reverence. It’s become my year-end, and the morning after my new year’s day.

I haven’t written a solstice poem for a few years, and with all the discordant forces at work in our world it seemed a good time to ask if there was one this year, to close out a year that has been filled with creativity, growth, pain, loss and disillusionment. This poem pretty much wrote itself in a few hours.

Winter Solstice 2016

Time to strip naked again,
be empty and innocent.
Pile actions, belief, hope, vision
onto the Solstice fire.

Trusting the furnace is hard.

Burning the wreckage
of insufficient dreams is easy,
pieces of broken furniture
not worth mending, discovered …

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