As we do each year at this time, we post a poem celebrating
the summer solstice. However, as (a
bit back) a veteran of a memorable family vacation in Australia, I now realize
that, for our friends the quokkas (and the penguins!) for them, it’s the winter
solstice.
And thus, to treat the hemispheres evenhandedly, we here
post a hat-tip to both solstices.
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Summer Solstice
The sun at apogee, an empire all of light.
The sweet corn basks and ripens in its rays.
All memory of winter
has melted from our minds.
Yet even now the worm lies in the bud, one day to blast it.
The long limbs of daylight that had stretched and stretched
now imperceptibly
begin to shrink:
even as the cosmos
attains its outmost limit,
and sighs back
to collapse.
Alas, the Elves of Ice
lurk still in northern forests,
plotting their return.
======
Winter Solstice
Today (for y’all Down Under, whether marsupial or antarctic)
is the official Beginning of Winter. We celebrate after the traditional fashion of our
ancestors,dancing at midnight,
clad only in moonlight;
many a child was conceived on this day. (And they grow up with magic in their
eyes.)
Covertly, we rejoice
for a subterranean reason:
that while, nominally, this marks the onset of winter winds and bitter
chill, astronomically it ushers in
rather that annual apocatastasis,
whereby the days begin once again to lengthen, creeping towards the equinoctial
equilibrium of spring, and onwards towards their eventual estival-solstitial
apotheosis.
