WINTER SONNET

This weather shrinks the soul: wet, cold and grey;
Freezing your face like a December grave;
It cannot but recall mortality.
You wait in the cavernous, empty nave
And wish for the bright, fleeting clarity
Of winter sunshine to stream through and save
The stained glass from the gloom of dying day,
To lift and light you up and make you brave.
The world turns and flowers yielded to frost
Will stir again beneath hard, ancient ground,
To remind you that some of what is lost
May rise up like a proverb and be found:
That what you can’t control, you rise above
And though seasons pass, what stays is our love.


(2010)

The last one from ‘The Seasons: A Sonnet Sequence’. When I had finished this, I became aware that it does somewhat recall Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and I considered reworking it, but then I thought, what the hell, there’s room for both and, as they say, there’s nothing new under the sun anyway…

The photograph was taken in a church at Palma in Mallorca.