Braving January

I am back from Canada: cue gloom. It has rained every day since I got home: more gloom. The sky is, well, small, little and kind of grudging - nothing like the generous expanse of Canadian skies. Ho hum.

How to cope with January after the excitement of walking on frozen lakes, hiking and seeing the paw prints of cougars in the snow, dabbling my fingers in an inlet of the Pacific Ocean and getting to spend a week with my Canadian son? Do I mention the Aurora Borealis? Saw them too. January is not generally a good month for me but this trip was amazing and I managed a bit of writing. I have managed to hone the poem I began in my last Substack post and have written another. My solution to the January blues turns out to be poetry.

This morning my stanza group met. It was lovely to see everyone again; the poems were diverse and excellent and some touched upon tide as about moving forwards, making the most of time and life. We also looked at something by a FAMOUS poet, not just our own stuff and discussed other work we had read. Poetry, writing it, listening to it, discussing it and sharing it seems to be an effective talisman against the January blues. Here’s a poem from me written in an attempt to move forward into Spring. Hope it acts as a talisman for you.

The feet of little egrets

are a talisman against

winter

These are the hard yards:

interminable dark mornings,

body holding itself like a clenched fist

against the cold.

And, God, oh God, the rain!

It is a torment, cruel as pressing

your bare face against pins.

The garden, in its seasonal abandonment,

is sodden earth, a time of grey and yellow

withered things, muddy paths

of slippery brown.

We put on boots, waterproofs,

determine to brave the state of things

and walk across the water meadows.

There will be little egrets

wading on golden feet along the bank,

draped like white handkerchiefs

on the bare boughs of the willow trees.