Mattie's Pillow

In honor of the turning of the year–past the solstice and heading for a new year and new decade, go back to something you wrote long ago and look at it again.  Find something you like about it and give it a fresh start–either rewriting from the seed of the old material,  or just dusting it off and reading it with new eyes, as my old friend Larry Laraby did with this poem:

The Light Waits (a winter solstice poem)

The inexorable movement of darkness
Slow accumulation of night
We gather the multitude of dark hours
And cast them to the sun
Light waits behind the closed
Doors of winter
Light that waits to dance
That waits to sing
The sun’s day
Solstice
In that immense moment
The earth stops its turning
And we celebrate
The retreating night.

(Thanks, Larry!)

—————————————-

A Response from Glow:

“At dawn she went to the ridge to wait.”

For years, I have wondered
why she waited
and for what?
Did her wait turn fruitful?
Did she come, did the letter arrive, was the child born?
The news arrive? The medicine turn up? The mystery solved?

There is a drawing,
the title is the mystery phrase:
at dawn she went to the ridge to wait.
butch dyke in a woman’s cloak
a stout walking stick held before her
a tiny grassland village hunched on the ridge
folded into the valley below her.

For me the mystery is double.
I both wrote the title and drew the drawing.
I do not know what either mean.
Only that I, too, will eventually recognize
the ridge in the drawing
it will manifest into reality some dawn
I will grasp my sturdy walking stick
climb up the hill in the early twilight
and wait.

Tags: Alaska, Fairbanks, poetry, solstice, winter, writing, writing prompt

This entry was posted on December 22, 2009 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Poetry Challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.