It is fully winter in my part of the world, and we had a blizzard last weekend that is finally melting away. That makes me think of "Blizzard" by William Carlos Williams.
Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down �
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes �
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there �
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.
Williams says "three days or sixty years, eh?" and I wonder about the blizzards we endure.
In his poem, "Winter Trees," there is an optimism in the trees that have prepared for the inevitable and will wait out the cold.
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
I did some searching online to find the Williams poems and came upon a page of winter words, including some poets and poems that I have not read for many years. If you're feeling the cold, make a nice cup of something hot to drink and read a few.
"The cold earth slept below"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The cold earth slept below;
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around,
With a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow
The breath of night like death did flow
Beneath the sinking moon.
The wintry hedge was black;
The green grass was not seen;
The birds did rest
On the bare thorn�s breast,
Whose roots, beside the pathway track,
Had bound their folds o�er many a crack
Which the frost had made between...
continue reading
White-Eyes
by Mary Oliver
In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees
where the wind-bird
with its white eyes
shoves and pushes
among the branches.
Like any of us
he wants to go to sleep,
but he's restless...
continue reading
(1923). It didn�t sell well at first, but gradually gained a readership, becoming especially popular in the 1960s and was eventually translated into more than 30 languages.
(also Laozi or Lao-Tze) was a philosopher and poet of ancient China. He is known as the reputed author of the Tao Te Ching and the founder of philosophical Taoism, and as a deity in religious Taoism and traditional Chinese religions. Although he is a legendary figure, he is usually dated to around the 6th century BCE and reckoned a contemporary of Confucius.
