03 June 2007

Warm December

Sunlight flowers in winter:
one morning you brought them to me
so I could breathe
forsythia.

Yellow salve in the sky
on Christmas Eve. (The next day gray,
we suffocated in its
congested color,

longed for yesterday.)
As if sun tea on the deck,
clear cold steeps ripe red
and yesterdays become

wept pools of snow
feeding the early forsythia.

3 comments:

Stephen Imperato said...

you got that email too? mine reminded me that i belonged to treefull and the long lost blog, pop-up poetry, a blog to which i don't think i've ever contributed a single post or comment.

welcome back to the blogosphere, emily!

Stephen Imperato said...

oops, i commented on the wrong post.

this one deserves a much more thoughtful response.

i love the repetition of super-specific details here.

a breed of flower works perfectly here. forsythia brings in smells, color, and a time frame. it's a bright yellow, spring-blooming, bush that i've always associated with golf course fairways for some reason. early spring really takes over the poem in the early and late stanzas when forsythia is mentioned.

the iced tea brewing in the sun is also a beautiful little detail that i can personally relate to. my father always hated powdered iced tea, so he brews his own in the summertime in an old ocean spray jar that he sets out on the patio on sunny days (also tastes delicious when brewed with a sprig of mint leaves).

this is a strong, detail-oriented poem that takes the humdrum topic of changing seasons and puts it through a detail-filter, personalizing it and making is far more interesting than just the usual change in temperature, melting snowbanks, and flora/fauna revival.

also, i like the complicated enjambment between stanzas 2 and 3, breaking up the parenthetical. breaking the poem up in the midst of a tangential thought like that almost makes the break and space between the stanzas disappear altogether.

this poem should have been posted back in march.

silverline said...

The seasons shifting is the main flow of this, but it works nicely to also show a subtext of perhaps a love changing, fading, & potentially regrowing.

The sun tea is also wonderful bridge image because it is summer, yet cold steeps holds the poem still for a moment.

A little christmas in June I suppose.