I’ve been writing winter solstice poems for close to fifty years. Not every year, but this profound solar event seems to present itself to me over and over as a moment to take seriously, in reverence. It’s become my year-end, and the morning after my new year’s day.
I haven’t written a solstice poem for a few years, and with all the discordant forces at work in our world it seemed a good time to ask if there was one this year, to close out a year that has been filled with creativity, growth, pain, loss and disillusionment. This poem pretty much wrote itself in a few hours.
Winter Solstice 2016
Time to strip naked again,
be empty and innocent.
Pile actions, belief, hope, vision
onto the Solstice fire.
Trusting the furnace is hard.
Burning the wreckage
of insufficient dreams is easy,
pieces of broken furniture
not worth mending, discovered
in the wistful dim attic of my soul.
I’ve done it before.
But the other dreams?
If it’s insufficient, it will burn.
Trial by fire.
I risk losing the good dreams,
the ones I might fix up one day and re-upholster,
the dreams beloved people now dead sat in at night,
settled in their warm comfort and imperfections,
dreams I’d rather keep — losing them
hurts long before I let go.
The last gift
of an insufficient dream
is essence, light
set free as it burns.
Throw everything in.
Then climb in and trust,
like the three men in Daniel.
Search in the morning, as the sun rises,
with a heart knowing ash
as well as fire,
find what remains
untouched among the bitter ashes:
a small obsidian goddess;
seeds cracking open with new life;
a pen that still works.
Find what remains
in the light of day.
Lloyd A. Meeker