The year's threshold

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
~Margaret Atwood

Ariana's gnome

Happy Poetry Friday! A winter solstice poem today by Margaret Atwood, who has written many more poems that people usually suspect! Hope y'all are able to keep warm (if you're in my vicinity or one of the other cold spots). Sending love to you all, wherever you are.

excerpt from SHAPECHANGERS IN WINTER
by Margaret Atwood

This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar.
Taking hands like children
lost in a six-dimensional
forest, we step across.
The walls of the house fold themselves down,
and the house turns
itself inside out, as a tulip does
in its last full-blown moment, and our candle
flares up and goes out, and the only common
sense that remains to us is touch,
as it will be, later, some other
century, when we will seem to each other
even less what we were.
But that trick is just to hold on
through all appearances; and so we do,
and yes, I know it’s you;
and that is what we will come to, sooner
or later, when it’s even darker
than It is now, when the snow is colder,
when it’s darkest and coldest
and candles are no longer any use to us
and the visibility is zero: Yes.
It’s still you. It’s still you.

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Seneca Creek State Park

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—
       he has an idea,
          and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings
    as long as he stays awake
       But his big, round music, after all,
          is too breathy to last...

read the rest here

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Live Your Poem has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Irene!