The Winter is Cold, is Cold

Amir Belhoula

The Winter is Cold, Is Cold

The winter is cold, is cold.

All’s spent in keeping warm.

Has joy been frozen, too?

I blow upon my hands

Stiff from the biting wind.

My heart beats slow, beats slow.

What has become of joy?

 

If joy’s gone from my heart

Then it is closed to You

Who made it, gave it life.

If I protect myself

I’m hiding, Lord, from you.

How we defend ourselves

In ancient suits of mail!

 

Protected from the sword,

Shrinking from the wound,

We look for happiness,

Small, safety-seeking, dulled,

Selfish, exclusive, in-turned.

Elusive, evasive, peace comes

Only when it’s not sought.

 

Help me forget the cold

That grips the grasping world.

Let me stretch out my hands

To purifying fire,

Clutching fingers uncurled.

Look! Here is the melting joy.

My heart beats once again.

Madeleine L' Engle

 

Snow and fire. Fear or trust. 

 

 

Where does joy begin?

From Blossoms

Claude Monet

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward  

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into  

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee

"To take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard..."  What a gorgeous image. If only I could, if only that were possible. Can we get something into our heads enough that nothing can shake it out? I'd like to think that on some dark day to come, some future moment of despair I might take the thread in my hand and follow it down twisting trails to this orchard of joy, this reserve of sweetness, this living breathing growing hope for always flowers and fruit. Is that possible? I can only find out if I take what I love inside, if I do some work on this orchard.

Listen

Diana Ashdown.

Listen

Listen, I have flown through darkness towards joy,

I have put the mossy stones away from me,

and the thorns, the thistles, the brambles.

I have swum upward like a fish

through the black wet earth, the ancient roots

which insanely fight with each other

in a grave which creates a treasure house

of light upward-springing leaves.

Such joy, such joy! Such airy drama

the clouds compose in the heavens,

such interchange of comedies,

disguises, rhymes, denouements.

I had not believed that the stony heads

would change to actors and actresses,

and that the grooved armour of statues

would rise and walk away

into a resurrection of villages,

townspeople, citizens, dead exiles,

who sing with the salt in their mouths,

winged nightingales of brine.

Iain Crichton Smith

This is one of those poems like “The Conflict” by C.Day Lewis, or “Thalassa” by Louis MacNeice and several others that I’ve posted, in which the speaker clearly sees the difficulty and struggle in their circumstances and nonetheless chooses to work toward hope. The poem talks about swimming upward through the soil like a fish, but I have this picture in my mind of a seed sprout pushing its way toward the surface as well. The images are wonderful – the statues walking, the “resurrection of villages” – and the description of life as such an “interchange of comedies, disguises, rhymes, denouements”, so true. Can we too, fly birdlike, swim fishlike, (or reach flower or treelike) toward joy, toward light and hope? Is it possible to believe that the darkness is where we start? That this is where joy is rooted?