The Winter Palace

jennifer irvine

The Winter Palace

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints,

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

Philip Larkin

 

Forgetting. 

It seems like a good way to end the year.

Let's give endings their due.

Let's give the covering over, the forgiving, the yes, forgetting, it's place.

A time for everything, right?

And this is the time for an end.

 

Let it go.

Let it be.

Forget it.

 

A Christmas Childhood

Morgan Weistling

A Christmas Childhood

1.

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost –
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven’s gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw –
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood’s. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch,
Or any common sight, the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

2.

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.

And old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk –
The melodion.’ I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade –
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

Patrick Kavanagh

"And I was six Christmases of age."

Isn't that the truth of it - for a child to measure life by wonder?

Snow

 

Lucy Almy-Bird

 

 Snow

 

What is it to talk about silence?

When I look up from my table

it will still be there

where it fell in the night,

 

hurrying to congregate

in the cone cast by the streetlamp,

 

and in the darkness, the others,

unseen but legion.

 

How bruise-blue the shadows

on the garden

 

and the frozen cobwebs 

snapped beneath their weight.

In the park we blundered 

across it, the quiet,

in spite of its exclamatory outline

on bare trees,

down great hushed halls of white

and the white lake picked out in kanji

by the moorhen's feet.

Are there words for what I felt

in the faceted garden?

Motes, corpuscles, animalcules.

 

And it is a relief to feel it touch me

with its meaning,

it's vast multitudinous silence,

again and again.

Catriona O'Reilly

Geis (2015)

 

I love that, "in the darkness, the others, unseen but legion" - 

or - "down great hushed halls of white".

 

"Are there words for what I felt?"

 

That truly is the question. 

In the mutitudinous presence of such artistry, 

what response can there be, but silence?

Silence and wonder.