Christmas 2024
Ode to Winter
We hoard light, hunkered in holt and burrow,
in cave, cwtsh, den, earth, hut, lair.
Sun blinks. Trees take down their hair.
Dusk wipes horizons, sweeps into the room,
the last flame of geranium in the gloom.
In the shortening day, bring in the late flowers
to crisp in a vase, beech to break into leaf,
a branch of larch. Take winter by the throat.
Feed the common birds, tits and finches,
the spotted woodpecker in his opera coat.
Let’s learn to love the icy winter moon,
or moonless dark and winter constellations,
Jupiter’s glow, a slow, incoming plane,
neighbourly windows, someone’s flickering screen,
a lamp-lit page, drawn curtains.
Let us praise intimacy, talk and books,
music and silence, wind and rain,
the beautiful bones of trees, taste of cold air,
darkening fields, the glittering city,
that winter longing, hiraeth, something like prayer.
Under the stilled heartbeat of trees,
wind-snapped branches, mulch and root,
a million bluebell bulbs lie low
ready to flare in lengthening light,
after the dark, the frozen earth, the snow.
Out there, fox and buzzard, kite and crow
are clearing the ground for the myth.
On the darkest day bring in the tree,
cool and pungent as forest. Turn up the music.
Pour us a glass. Dress the house in pagan finery.
Ode to Winter is from Gillian’s 2012 collection Ice
The photograph of our avenue of hornbeams was taken on the 11th December 2022
National Poet of Wales 2008-2016
Gillian Clarke was born in Cardiff and lives in Ceredigion. Her work has been on the GCSE and A Level exam syllabus for over thirty years, and she performs her poetry regularly for student audiences at Poetry Live, and in several European cities. Awarded the Queen’s Gold medal for Poetry in 2010, the Wilfred Owen Award in 2012. Prose works include a writer’s journal, At the Source. She has written radio and theatre drama, and translated poetry and prose from Welsh. The Gathering/Yr Helfa, commissioned by the National Theatre of Wales, was performed on Snowdon in September, 2014. Picador published her Selected Poems in 2016. Her tenth collection of poems, Zoology, was published by Carcanet in 2017. Her version of the book-long 7th century Welsh poem, Y Gododdin, is to be published by Faber in 2019.
