The Times Colonist Solstice Poetry series continues today with a poem from Anita Lahey.
The series concludes Sunday with our final poem, For the White Bird, by Terry Ann Carter.
Philip Kevin Paul kicked off the series on Wednesday with his work Such a Tiny Light. Yvonne Blomer, Victoria’s outgoing poet laureate, followed Thursday with Winter Solstice and Ali Blythe’s poem Swan appeared on Friday.
Lahey, who grew up in a region with four distinct seasons, calls her poem Winter’s Promise an ‘ode to a season in retreat.’
Lahey works as series editor of the annual anthology Best Canadian Poetry in English, and is the author of two poetry collections (Out to Dry in Cape Breton and Spinning Side Kick), both published by Véhicule Press in Montreal.
Winter’s Promise
by Anita Lahey
for Henry and Monique
I’ll fashion for you a polished pond
ringed with icicled reeds, a simple field
brushed smooth and bright,
a clutch of bare-limbed trees.
I’ll shape a snowball for your mitt,
spin crystals into birds. I’ll tuck
your snowpants in your boots
and whisper not a word
of the storms a-gathering fall to spring
on climate modellers’ screens,
or how I’m luring monstrous winds
into my watchful eyes
where they whistle, wallop, whip
and rage, blizzarding my view
at every blink or turn of mind —
I urge them to lay low
till seasons slip back into sync
or we move further north
to resurrect this shivering myth
where fairies chisel window art
and angels forgo flight.
Their airy wings unfold, fall still,
imprint the sugary ground
as I conjure one olden, frozen pond
in piercing, glittering light.
A mad red cardinal cheer-cheer-cheers
and wherever, wherever, wherever we go,
chickadees hop in our hands.
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About the author
I grew up in a region of the country with four distinct seasons. Without the profound silences, brittle deep-freezes and rawness of the winter landscape, the natural cycle seems incomplete to me. Living in Victoria, as
I do now, I feel oddly unsettled through the winter months, as if the true season, in all its harshness and bleakness, is ever on the verge of descending.
I’m braced for a gale that never lets loose. And I’m waiting for permission to retreat — that luxurious wintry hibernation of the mind. On this admittedly beautiful island of lush green Decembers and bright winter blossoms, such permission is withheld.
What really troubles me, though, is what climate change might ultimately mean for the snow-blanketed season of contemplation and rest. I suppose this is the opposite of that old joke about the great consolation of global warming bringing milder winters (a false promise, in any case).
This poem is an ode to a season in retreat, or at least in disturbing flux. It’s for my son, who might not experience the glorious abandonment of childhood winters so familiar to me, and for my lifelong friend Monique, who grew up in the thick of the same winters I did, and who has been befriending black-capped chickadees of late on her cold morning walks along Toronto’s lakeshore.
Like so many of those in this trade, I’m a writer of many stripes: journalist, essayist, reviewer, poet. I work as series editor of the annual anthology Best Canadian Poetry in English, and I’m the author of two poetry collections (Out to Dry in Cape Breton and Spinning Side Kick), both published by Véhicule Press in Montreal.
My prose collection The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture contains pieces on Canadian poets both famed (P.K. Page) and lesser known (Dorothy Roberts), as well as personal essays, including Confessions of a Eulogist, a study and defence of a much-maligned literary form. My book The Last Surviving Goldfish: A Memoir of Friendship is forthcoming from Biblioasis.
