Snow Melt and Silence

The seasons shape us and provide an ever changing, and yet somehow familiar pattern to our lives. We know that winter will be a time of darkness, of candlelight and clinging to the warmth of home. Spring will bring signs of new life and hope, a waking after the dormant time of winter. Summer brings warmth, a full connection with nature and memories of holidays and stepping out of the pressures of work. Autumn offers us a poignant, wistful mood, a time of letting go, of reflecting and preparing for the dark, cold months of winter ahead. The seasons, with their feast days and festivals, are carried in us, like a heartbeat, a rhythm that we can, if we remain mindful to our surroundings, tune into and inhabit.

These poems, written over a twenty year period, weren't composed with the seasons in mind, and yet somehow they were influenced by the cycles of the year, the tone of the season in which they were written. They are seasonal in the sense that they pick up the mood of the season, or give a glimpse of nature in the first flush of spring, or the leaf fall of autumn.