WINTER GRIEF When you find yourself alone in this winter's narrow light, when you want to come out of the darkness only to confirm you can return there again. When you see by a single glance through the misted window that the rain has come to beat on your walls. When you watch yourself alone and walking, when you watch yourself alone and remembering so closely what you never wanted to remember. When everything near to you is too near to you and everything faraway is still too far away. Let this wind and this winter and this rain and this weather and all the difficult blessings of the world find you here, walking in the shelter of white walls under the tracery of stone windows in the nest of greenness at the valley floor below a sailing sky between mountains and green fields among centuries of the rested dead. Let the green that laps at their graves hold your memories in place when they want to slip through your hands. Let the rest in this rested place rest for you. Let the birds sing quietly and the geese call from far off and let the sky race from west to east when you cannot lift a wing to fly. Let evening trace your loss in the branches against a fading sky. So that you can give up and give in and be given back to, so that you can let winter come and live fully inside you, so that you can retrace the loving path of heartbreak that brought you here. So you can cry alone and be alone so you can let yourself alone to be lost, so you can let the one you have lost alone, so that you can let the one you have lost have their own life and even their own death without you. So that the world and everyone who has ever lived and ever died can come and go as they please. So you can let yourself not know, what not knowing means. So that you can be even more generous in your letting go than they were in their leaving. So that you can let winter be winter. So that you can let the world alone to think of spring. -the original text of this poem was first published in The Bell and the Blackbird and collected in the recently published The Seven Streams: An Irish Cycle
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So many of the comments with regard to 'Winter Grief' are so heartfelt I just wanted to post a thank you to every one for your poignant contributions. 'Winter Grief' was written for a friend in County Clare who was going through a long and difficult winter of necessary inconsolability. DW
That excerpt is stunningly beautiful in meaning and design. Brushstrokes of a master. The sadly sweet tinge of reality buoyed by the hope of release. And so it is… 🙏