Winter poems

Afternoon

Winter moods etched in trees now bare;
Alone in the sky, branches reach toward
Clean blue day,
But it isn’t there.

Night

Storm clouds,
thunder, humid wind and rain
Moistening the night in springlike warmth;
I step out on a wet porch;
It’s very quiet.
The cat is rocking in the chair.

Morning

The rain has ceased, the wind is weak;
I cannot see the world afresh.
I thought it would be
As I peered out my window at the oak tree.
No clear, cold bracing world of wind-driven clarity,
Just a waiting time,
Watching skies for signs of parting clouds;
Calm before the cold.
Gray ambivalence since dawn.

When I write poems such as the short ones above, I do so because I suddenly, and for mysterious reasons, feel the need to express myself in some kind of freer and less constricted form of writing when no other means of expression seems right or appropriate. I never wrote much poetry before starting an online journal. I didn’t read much poetry after I left teaching. I was an English teacher for three years, and almost every week I would either read, write, discuss, assign poetry for class, or have poetry writing sessions in my classes. It was eye-opening. I saw deeply into poetry for the first time because I was making a conscious effort to know what the poet was at least trying to say. I was deliberately reading the poems, with the purpose of trying to elicit other points of view and interpretatiions from my students. Thus, the experience of reading poetry was greatly enriched and more meaningful than I ever would have imagined.

When the students wrote poetry for class, the results were often staggering, mysterious and beautiful. They wanted their poetry to be read, although anonymously sometimes. Poetry coming from the minds of the young can be so fresh and exhilerating, free from some of the inhibitions of older writers. I was often in awe.

Now, I have to read poetry without the subtext of teaching it and preparing to discuss it. Or reading it out loud, which often brings it to life in ways silent reading can never approach.

But I will continue to write poetry as long as one person reads it because it is the only way I can sometimes say anything at all. I would be wordless, speechless on those occasions without the ability to write down my thoughts in poems.

I came to realize that to study poetry was to replicate the way we learn and think. When we read a poem, we enter the consciousness of another. It requires that we loosen some of our fixed notions in order to accommodate another point of view — which is a model of the kind of intellectual openness and conceptual sympathy that a liberal education seeks to encourage. To follow the connections in a metaphor is to make a mental leap, to exercise an imaginative agility, even to open a new synapse as two disparate things are linked….Further to see how poetry fits language into the confines of form is to experience …the need for information to be shaped and configured to be intelligible. It is to understand that form is a way of thinking, an angle of approach.

Billy Collins
U.S. Poet Laureate