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Ancient Winter Writers

Approaching winter...

OK, maybe encroaching mid-winter
of life's seasonal span
with resonantly compelling grace,
perhaps even transparent vulnerability,
feels controversial, 
too laissez-faire

Too much courage
in declaring preliminary success
with too little curiosity
about what happens next
on planet Earth

Continuing to revolve all four seasons
dynamics
holistic lenses.

I recall the poet's admonition
to not go quietly
into this winterish
cold night.

Life's final reflective opportunity
does not invite quiet
so much as impassioned peace
of a windless snowfall
blanketing all I can see
and more faintly hear,
touch and awkwardly feel,
smell and bittersweetly taste
unsafe passage.

I recently moved from autumn habitat,
a creative tension between summer's midlife climax
and this new winter habit
above Connecticut's exquisite Salmon River.

This is a compromised writer's winter hermitage
shared with my son who cannot speak
but can roar,
who cannot walk by himself
but can scoot
and belly laugh at his own internal sensations
and my external sensational sounds.

And, following Daquan
from my fall habitat
to winter's eremetical search for peace,
however coldly displaced,
with social
and political
and spiritual
and natural distancing,

Behind Daquan
are daily in-home nurses
and his most avid companion,
my romantically distanced husband.

He comes bearing gifts
of clothes,
cleaning supplies,
far too much meaty food
for a proper hermitage
and not enough
for sufficient redemption
and for self-forgiveness.

He comes unaware of my ecofeminist wintering spirit,
longing for Earth's warm womb justice
restoring peace
resilient through all four seasons
of present
past
and future Earth lives.

My ecofeminist lineage
feels too white to him,
not a journey for him
and our two brown sons
and my brown and cerebral palsied daughter
and Daquan.

So, this writer's winter hermitage
remains newly compromised by past fall
and summer
and even spring
of extended multicultural family life.

May it always be so
or no,
I'm not sure which to pray for
or against
as I quietly write
into this warm and peaceful night,
just right,
not too dim or bright.

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