The appropriate day to dust off this poem; I hope that the sky will be clear later, because I’d like to see the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.
21st December 2007
The sky’s deep blue; the mid-height clouds are very slow,
In the faltering northerly wind – that same
Which blew with chilling confidence all through the tree-pruning afternoon.
But now in the Great Above, the engine of the weather prepares itself
To swing the sky around the compass rose,
To back the breeze past the western cardinal point,
Until it can run its armies of isobars at us hard again
From the Scillies, then from further out in the Western Approaches, until they stream in
From beyond beyond: from that wide nowhere of water
Where mariners forget that land exists.
The charts of the meteorologists
– Those astrologers of climate –
Foretell how that lurking depression
Which Atlantic satellites have already spotted,
And instruments on warships measure now,
Will deepen, twist, and strengthen like a tightening clockspring
Before it descends upon us as a storm, at full gallop.
And all too soon it will trample over our peninsula,
Then stamp and kick and stub its way
Across the Cambrian Mountains, and the high Pennines,
And over the Wolds beyond, easily,
Before with glee it churns another sea and,
Rowdy as a returning Norseman,
Celebrates thunderously
Around the ice-castled heads of long deep fiords.
But not yet: tonight, blue sky, fine-edged light white clouds,
Fields in solemn green:
Strong moonlight, prickled around with the brightness of the sharper stars.
And if with these words above I have surprised you,
Forgive me for failing to say that the now
Of this walk is the approach of midnight,
And the when is the eve of the Earth’s New Year.
SOLSTICE, for which the crunching waves of the bay
Have patted the strand, it seems,
To an especial flatness:
Celebratory perfection on this so-bright night,
This night so richly filled with colours
That although the crispened temperature
Confirms that we’re in winter, without question,
Any image that we might bring home to view again some other time
Could be thought the memory of a summer day,
Seen darkly through silver burnt too dim.
© Christopher Jessop 2007