First posted on December 21, 2014

The winter solstice occurs on Thu Dec. 21, 2023 at 9:27 p.m. Eastern Standard in North America. This day will last 7 hours 14 minutes here to Toronto, Canada, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. After that the light will grow day by day until the longest day around June 21st.

The poem that follows was written in Venice Beach, California in 1993, a long way from Hereford Hill in Quebec’s Eastern Townships where a child rode in a sleigh under a buffalo robe, for Buffalo robes still existed then. The woods have grown ever deeper. The country belongs to the rabbits, the deer, the moose and the bears up on the mountain.

Winter Solstice

Such deep dark
so long sustained
should smell of balsam,
cedar, pine,
should have a canopy of icy stars,
of Northern lights,
shifting panes of white or green.

-A child under a buffalo robe
watching a sleigh runner
cut through blue
moon-shadowed snow
sees a rabbit track running off
into deep woods.-

Waking in the depth
of this longest night,
thirsty for sleep,I hear
the pounding surf,
an angry wordless shout
one floor below
and the reverberating slam
of a dumpster lid.
The sky at least is quiet:
a star hangs
above the flight path.

In my long sleep,
I have been following
that track back
into the woods
breathing spruce pitch
and resined pine,
lashed by boughs of evergreen,
until I have arrived at this
secret place
which only wild things know,
a place to shelter
while things end,
time unwinds,
the circle turns.

When we awaken,
shouting, homeless,
single and bereft,
we will go forth
into the growing light,
a light
we creatures of the dark
must yet endure.

This is the place,
now is the time
for the birth of the Child
in the cave of the heart.

See joycehowe.com for my latest novel, I Trust You to Kill Me set in 2120 in Colombia as climate change and sea rise change the world. People like Alena Rivera, an Intelligence agent, want to give up on life, but Destiny has other ideas.

I Trust You to KIll Me, the last words of a Sufi martyr killed on the bank of the Tigris in 922.

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