Notes About The Poem
Written 10th August
Poetry Wheel Challenge:
Theme: Adventure Emotion: Courage Color: Pearl
Season: Midwinter Form: Ode. Object: Mirror Verb: Sing
Ode to a Mirror that Sings in Midwinter
It begins quietly—
not with a step outward,
but with a turning.
The mirror is already waiting.
Pearl-light, not bright, not dim—
something between breath and bone,
as if the surface remembers
every face that has hesitated before it.
I come to it without ceremony.
No armor. No declaration of bravery.
Just the small, brittle sound of being here.
And still—
it asks.
Not loudly.
Never loudly.
It asks in the way frost asks the window
to hold its pattern,
in the way winter asks the trees
to stand without answers.
Look, it says.
Look longer than comfort allows.
There is adventure here,
though no road unfolds,
no horizon splits open with promise.
Only this:
a depth that does not end
because it is not distance,
but return.
I thought courage would feel like fire—
a flare, a rising, a refusal to break.
But here, in this pearl-lit quiet,
it is something else entirely.
A staying.
A listening
so complete
it becomes a kind of song.
And yes—
the mirror sings.
Not with sound,
but with recognition.
Each breath fogs the surface,
then clears—
a rhythm of appearing and vanishing,
as if the self must be sung into being
again
and again.
I see the tremor.
I see the unfinished parts.
I see the places where I almost turned away.
And I do not.
This is the crossing—
not over land or sea,
but through the thin, cold space
between who I am
and who I refuse to see.
Midwinter holds me there.
No bloom.
No promise of easy thaw.
Only the slow making of something enduring—
like pearl,
formed in the quiet insistence of time,
layered around an irritation
that never fully leaves.
So I stand.
And if my voice comes,
it comes softly—
cracked, uncertain,
but mine.
I sing.
Not to be heard,
but to remain.
And the mirror,
faithful keeper of this small, fierce act,
holds it—
turns it—
gives it back as light.
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