Today marks the start of what has become an annual tradition at the Times Colonist: Poetry for the winter solstice.

Between now and New Year's Eve, we're presenting new works created for the newspaper by five Victoria-area poets. This year, our writers are Mike Bond, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Grace Cockburn, Garth Martens and Rhonda Ganz, and as always, the subject matter is as distinctive and varied as the poets themselves.

This is the fourth year we've commissioned local writers to create poems that celebrate the season of short days and long nights. We began the practice at the urging of Wendy Morton, a sparkplug of a woman who once crisscrossed the country as WestJet's Poet of the Skies and created a national guerrilla literary event called Random Acts of Poetry.

Morton's pitch was straightforward, as you might expect from someone who wrote a memoir called Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. "Why don't you publish some local poetry?" she said, cornering a senior editor at a public event. "Just try it," she insisted.

So we did.

This year, as she has in some past years, Morton helped select the poets for the solstice series.

Today we present the first, Mike Bond's Days of Fading Light (Solstice).

Turning over new leaves

Mike Bond might have been born in Limerick, but that's not his preferred kind of verse. He likes ballads -- and his favourite imagery relates to leaves and trees.

"Ever since moving here in 2001 I've been obsessed by leaves," said the Irish writer, who paints houses for a living. "Ireland is denuded. I used to walk along Sycamore Avenue at home, and was 10 years old before I even knew what a sycamore was."

An avid reader of children's botanical books and articles -- "I read them like adventure stories as a kid" -- even today Bond often uses the natural world as a springboard in his poems.

"Growing up in Limerick was like growing up in a walking cast. If you studied art you were either stupid or queer, and neither was a great choice in a working-class area."

He was beaten in school for poor spelling -- "A good beating was supposed to improve mind and body"-- but loved reading the poems of Yeats and Service.

Bond left school at 16 to work in a series of semi-skilled jobs and finished university 20 years later. "Having a degree is a very good lesson in proving you don't need one," he said, adding it was art therapy training that unlocked his creativity.

The unpublished poet writes a poem a week and reads at Planet Earth poetry nights at the Black Stilt Coffee Lounge, across the street from Hillside Mall.

Asked to define his style, he roared with laughter: "I'm a balladeer who's taken advantage of free verse."

Besides trees and leaves he's absorbed by the changing seasons, and sees winter as a time for reflection, "for taking stock of our humanity."

Days of fading light (Solstice)

By Mike Bond

Nights of fat darkness piled

on leaden days of fading light,

a time fit for surrender

had we but the courage.

Instead we fight it out at the mall

for trinkets polished perhaps by

small hands in distant places.

Bright plastic colours battle

the diminished light

and we avoid the need

to lie, to sleep.

The slow thump, thump in the

veins of bears in mountain caves

echo in our darkening breasts

uncontested, mortality’s questions seep

and flood our higher spaces.

give thanks for bright lights

and all night shopping

these nights of fat darkness.