In Week 2, small ruminations on the season, and how it affects mood of the poet and the poem, but also one or two riffs that may become full poems this year.  I decided that 18 days’ worth was too much to post all at once, and have instead chosen to post a week at a time.

Jan. 8 2016

Some days no voices break against
the quiet of the day, but words rush
forth born of lines rising out of books
urgent in their hunger to be heard.
Other days chatter drowns
the sound of syntax, blocks
the flow of couplet or quatrain,
and every page remains its pristine
and lonely white.

Jan. 9 2016

When do you stop choosing
to climb up when you reach
the bottom of the dark?
Or is there no choice
but to seek out the light?
What thing inside fights
to survive the dark as
the drowning fight in panic
frantic for the air.

Jan. 10 2016
LEFT VS RIGHT. JUSTIFIED.

They say that left-handed people are

the only ones in their right minds
to justify the claim of right-thinking
even genius. They list
the actors, the musicians, U.S. presidents
and royalty, but
always begin with genius—
Leonardo, Madame Curie, Albert Einstein.

And what of writers?
Isn’t it easier

to slant to right instead of backhand
or the left hand-smirch of ink—
always the blue-sided fist or even teal.

But even so

they boast their Mark Twain, their Helen Keller

and their artists—

Michelangelo! Escher! Even Klee!
held their brushes slantwise
or suffered paint from wrist to elbow—
muddy umber blend of cadmium, yellow ochre, cobalt blue.

The only fallacies in all the theories

that they’re clumsy, somehow sinister, born of Satan
and on the wrong side of the blanket.

It’s all just jealousy from the run-of-the-mill
righthanders.
Carol A. Stephen

Jan. 11 2016

A month of short days and still-black
skies at morning herald dim hours of winter.
Slow dawn brings chill blue skies: the light
returns. Why is the cost of sunlight
the icy wind of January and what blows in
upon it? The linden sheds more small branches
to delight my neighbour in his not-so-secret wish
to see the tree itself come down.

Jan. 12 2016
The white world has returned, scourge
of the faint-heart driver I’ve become,
snug and cosy, adrift and surfing
in the virtual world technology inflicts.
My penalty? The guilt at the undone,
the unmade soup, unfinished poems,
and all the unread books I fool myself
that someday I will read.

Jan. 13 2016

Binder after binder I browse
my life in poems, year on year
the ebb and flow of form, of rhyme
or free-flow and line breaks, found
poems, lost words, rediscovered
and throughout the same themes
same stories: time and the river,
time and the body, the creak and sag
the losses: youth, work, husband, lover
the elusive freedom from fear,
the euphoria of joy.

Jan. 14 2016
I wonder why winter
Why it isn’t my season even though
it matches the season of my life
I was born in April, the season of renewal
In a kind world spring children should share
the gift of renewing youth.

CAS

Each January for the last several years, I have participated in one way or another with the Small Stones/River of Stones challenge.  This year I have been struggling with inspiration as it always seems like the cold and the snow are uppermost in my mind as January begins, and as winter takes its firm hold.  I was an April baby, and perhaps that is why over the years I have found the darker months of the year difficult. They’ve become a time of hibernation and a depressing season, as it is for many of us. This is perhaps why I have held off posting this year’s Small Stones.

As the days start lengthening though, I find myself striving to find other words to move away from the dead of winter. With mixed results. These are, as always, spontaneous writing, and so very much first drafts, potential discards or lines for mining later and carving into something else when the time comes. Here are the Stones for January 1st to 7th.

Small Stone for January 1, 2016

In the air, strains of Auld Lang Syne.
As images of foreign shores fill the screen
with wishes for the year, a bittersweet
memory of someone no longer here
to share the new lingers still.

Among bygones and shadows,
filtered images of yesterday
blur sepia. Another leaf
drops from the tree, buried
in the snowy pages of fallen years,
the new calendar yet blank of story.

Jan 2 2016

Last week the grass still spoke in summer dialect
today the world breathes cold and colder still
Neighbours call thanks over the road
for help with the daily task of digging out from
under winter’s weighted white

Jan. 3 2016

Sky and snow blur to one,
the sun hibernating this noon.
Over the river the greyness darkens
to promises of fresh white
and cotton wool dreams

Jan. 4 2016
Out from the shadows of the old year,
brilliance of a January day pretends
a warmth it doesn’t own, only the promises
we grasp as if it were the gold ring
we’ve searched for,
always another distance.

Carleton Place on the Mississippi

Rivers to cross,
crosses to carry,
we carry
hopes still wished for but
still
just a hairsbreadth more.

Jan. 5 2016
A weight descends out of darkness
muffling the music and I’ve stopped dancing,
stopped singing too, my voice
a silent croak as notes, no longer in my throat,
rise silently out of hearing.

It is not comfortable here.
Somewhere, as the year approached its close
inner strength died too, beneath the long dark hours.
I waver here between the pain of moving forward
and the pain of staying still.

Jan. 6 2016

Heard screams are terrifying, but those unheard
are more terrifying still
– from Odysseus Blinds Polyphemus, The Polyphemus Painter,
Dual Impressions, John Brantingham & Jeffrey Graessley

Unmoving here the silence deafens as only silence can,
yet inside my head, the sound of a voice,
terrifying in its screams.

What is there in the dead of winter that
turns bones chill? As if, like the bounty of summer,
the spirit succumbs to the first killing frost.

Perhaps a child born of spring wilts too
as winds turn bitter when the sun turns its colder face
and the sky bleeds white.

Jan. 7 2016

“The moth’s single thought is light”
– from Notes for a Small Pocket/Call and Response Lorna Crozier

Suppose the world was only about light—
Light as religion, light equals life,
Light running through each artery, every vein.
What, then, of winter, of the dark time, the night?
Would there be a small death each night, not sleep,
but death, and rebirth with the coming of each day?
With each turn of the Earth upon its axis,
each black face of Earth
held away from the Sun, every evening
a new and quiet grieving.

(Wikipedia)