Lately I've been re-reading TS
Eliot's Four Quartets,
surely
one of the finest works of the 20th century, and started looking at
some blogs that include original poetry. Here's a sampling of some
poetry I've found that I especially like. I realize this is a hugely
subjective
assessment, so I've included a snippet from the work of each poet to
tease you, and a link to where you
can find more. The theme of all these excerpts, perhaps because this
endless winter is getting to me, is Ice and Snow. These are in no particular order:
I hold up shorn stumps of
flowers for the night wind to heal as a chickadee chants an afterlife
built of spring branches. Pressed between the pages of my dream: a
lingering scent; the death of last year's delphiniums; the tall tree
toppled in the yard; a crab apple flower; a shard of grass as brittle
as a bitter tongue at winter's end.
Now that the memory slips away
whole into its own country
where the swells break into stillness
and the black hour shadows out of its mouth
an icy spectacle of water banking its lightless flow
this child floating and his dead laughter
echo through darkness anchored in paradise
January: gentle snow flakes fall - salute the New Year. A soft surface
of white covers the field. Big Ben flakes spiral before they settle in
my hair. I slip on my rubbers - rigid and black. The old orchard is
barely visible. Tree branches bow with the weight of snow - some
collapse. Wrenched from the mother tree, leaving gaps of corpse white
wood. A frenzy of birds appear at the feeder, unaccustomed to this
white phenomenon. They crowd and peck, losing themselves in the pursuit
of food. A lone woodpecker gnaws a nearby tree.
I have seen you dressed in the deep ermine
snow of midwinter, elder brothers—
The tryst-keeping of your vanishing
and mine
mind different clocks,
but trace arcs of the same pendulum—
The photo of the Seine River in Paris, above, is by Sam Javanrouh from his wonderful photoblog Daily Dose of Imagery. Some of my own poetry can be found here.
And here are a few Ice & Snow lines from Eliot,:
Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. Whem the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart's heat, Reflecting in a watery mirror A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon. And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier, Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom Of snow, a bloom more sudden Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading, Not in the scheme of generation. Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
