IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER
—Jane Blue, Sacramento
The humble gingkoes as in some crucible turn gold.
A calla lily furls toward heaven, the mandarins are ripe.
Let us go into this Solstice with wood stacked, wine pressed,
the nearly obsolete fields surrounding the city fallow. A few
lights against the bleak midwinter, some song. But please—
no glare. This is what you shall do, says Whitman:
Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches,
give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy.
Gingkoes reflect in the windows of a bus, an avenue, a tunnel,
bringing me suddenly here, now. …re-examine all you have been told
at school or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul
and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
It’s December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception,
which is not about Jesus or virginity, it’s about being born without sin.
Yesterday buffeting wind and steady, gloomy rain. Today
liquidambars flare against an azure sky; they resist stripping.
I believe everyone is conceived without sin. The Feast
of Everybody. Red cyclamen jostle in a window box. Low-arced
sun stamps a radiant corolla behind the limbs of a bare ash tree.
Be one with the world, not one against the world, I say.
The gingkoes’ leaves fall in one piece to the ground, enameling
and effacing the lawns beneath them.
(Quotes from Leaves of Grass, the 1855 edition, Penguin Classics 150th Anniversary Edition.)
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—Medusa, with thanks to Jane Blue for her wonderful December 8 poem, which we took the liberty of posting on December 9, since it seems like more of a Sunday poem. "Let us go into this Solstice with wood stacked, wine pressed..."