Winter’s Margin

Shades of the prison house
exist within the shadows
lurk at the peripheries
of winter’s margin.

Our birth is but a sleep
and a forgetting – what?
The light, from which we came
still burns within.

Cold bites, the penniless poets
strike a match
burn incense, cup wax candles in star-jars
draw closer in.

Your hands recall the sculptor’s art
of Michelangelo
and I know all past glories of this earth
await some parallel, hidden rebirth

Beyond the edge of time
the porter lifts the northern bar
and spring pours in remembered light 
at winter’s margin.

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Written for earthweal

I’m late to the earthweal party this week, but I couldn’t miss Hedgewitch’s fantastic ‘First Poems’ challenge:

‘what are the first words that gave you that “..maker’s rage to order words..”? Your challenge is to look back to the first poems that helped you to find your own inner eye and voice, and write about it. 

Italicised lines are either quoted verbatim from (as in the first two instances) or inspired by Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,’ and (in the final stanza) Blake’s ‘Book of Thel.’ Both are poems I became familiar with at university, and they have guided my poetry (and, to a certain extent, my lifestyle) ever since.