For those of us wintering

a borrowed poem of hope

Dear readers & fellow poets,

January has me in a state of wintering. Partly from grief, as we mourn the loss of our dear old dog, Eisley; but also a need for my body to heal as I recover from surgery. I am one week post-op and went outside for the first time today to refill the bird feeder. The ground was frozen and the air was a flurry of ash from a nearby fire. My face stung from the frigid cold and my heart pounded. A small flock of dark-eyed juncos descended on spilt sunflower seeds as I made my way back to the front door. And there it was—a flicker of hope.

I realize this sort of dormancy has been a gift for me. It has also meant a pause in posts and emails to subscribers. I keep thinking of Sylvia Plath and the last of her bee sequence poems, Wintering. First published in her collection, Ariel, it is a poem of cold and despair, but also of hope for the coming spring. Its message also feels timely, not just because of the season, but the political climate as well. And, I think it speaks to the poet’s own hope for a return to creativity, which mirrors my own as I navigate this transformation.

Hopefully it’s okay for me to share the poem with you here. I have retyped it from my dogeared copy of Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath.

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Wintering

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife’s extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam
and the bottles of empty glitters—
Sir So-and-so’s gin.

This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects—
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees–the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin

To make up for the honey I’ve taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women—
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

Sylvia Path (1932 -1963)

My sweet cat Frida is also keeping me company while I rest and recover

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Thank you for reading a small spectacle, and for your understanding as I continue to recover. I will be back with a new poem soon.

Take care, friends.

MK