We’ve taken down all the Christmas things but there’s still a lot of winter to get through. William Carlos Williams will give us some insight and remind us of the birds outside:
At the winter’s midnight
we went to the trees, the coarse
holly, the basalm and
the hemlock for their greenAt the thick of the dark
the moment of the cold’s
deepest plunge we brought branches
cut from the green treesto fill our need, and over
doorways, about paper Christmas
bells covered with tinfoil
and fastened by red ribbonswe stuck the green prongs
in the windows hung
woven wreaths and above pictures
the living green. On themantle we built a green forest
and among those hemlock
sprays put a herd of small
white deer as if theywere walking there. All this!
and it seemed gentle and good
to us. Their time past,
relief! The room bare. Westuffed the dead grate
with them upon the half burnt out
log’s smoldering eye, opening
red and closing under themand we stood there looking down.
Green is a solace
a promise of peace, a fort
against the cold (though wedid not say so) a challenge
above the snow’s
hard shell. Green (we might
have said) that, wheresmall birds hide and dodge
and lift their plaintive
rallying cries, blocks for them
and knocks downthe unseeing bullets of
the storm. Green spruce boughs
pulled down by a weight of
snow–Transformed!
(from “Burning the Christmas Greens,” 1944, discovered here.)
