Sherry Chandler » Winter Solstice
Winter Solstice
It’s the solstice, which really is the reason for the season, longest night of the year. And if we build our campfires high, fill our houses with twinkling lights and evergreen, maybe we can entice the Sun back for another year. We have reason to hope. It’s always worked before.
Let us also hope, however, that Sol doesn’t come back too strong, given Global Warming.
To mark the day, I give you this poem I wrote in 1995. It was originally published in Pegasus, Fall/Winter 1998.
Ode to Gray Skies
It’s the dark time
and I am become a connoisseur of overcast
a scholar of achromotology
The sky is filled with water,
emptied of color,
yet it is not dull.
It has only brightness
embodied in the mass of cloud
that modulates in shades of gray
from battleship to dove
from slate to pearl.
It’s the dark time,
at dawn the sun makes no show,
the birds sing no aubade
In the west, the Wolf Moon
wrapped like a gypsy in a gray shawl,
keeps silent, her feral tales untold.
The cattle, black and still
under the white mist of their breath,
do not browse afield.
They wait, rumps windward,
for the dry yellow grass
that smells of summer.
It’s the dark time.
Persephone is underground
and death is over all the earth.
I do not love the earth tones,
the dead-grass brown,
the bare-tree gray.
The earth is filled with color;
it is emptied of light.
I watch only the sky.
Its deeps of cloud,
backlit, opalescent,
hold a promise of the sun.
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