Midwinter, 1980–81
The cold had a grammar then.
It conjugated the body
into ache and wait, into not-yet.
Doorways learned my outline.
Cardboard kept the minutes
from breaking apart.
Winter spoke plainly -
iron air,
a sky like an unanswering bell.
I was thin as a promise
I no longer trusted,
thinking how easy it might be
to loosen my grip on the hours,
let the dark finish the sentence for me.
And then -
not warmth, not rescue,
but a voice moving through the cold,
a song made entirely of restraint:
In the bleak midwinter,
as if someone had finally said aloud
where we were.
It didn’t deny the frost.
It named it.
Snow on snow.
Hard earth.
It didn’t lift me out of winter;
it knelt down inside it
and stayed.
The words carried no luxury,
only steadiness,
bare hands cupped around
a small flame
that refused to perform.
No triumph.
No escape.
Just endurance,
given a melody.
I remember how that sound
made space where there had only been pressure.
It asked nothing heroic of me,
only the question, quietly held:
What can I give Him?
I had nothing
but breath.
So I stayed with that.
Snow kept falling.
History kept grinding forward.
But the song stayed too,
like a hand at the back -
not pushing, not pulling -
only saying: remain.
Some winters teach you how to die.
That one taught me,
without warning,
how to stay.
What stayed with me was not the cold,
but the small, unperforming flame
that refused to go out.
It took years before I learned
where it had been carried.
Late Winter, Nearly Fifty Years On
The fire does not argue with the cold.
It accepts it,
lets it stand at the windows
while it keeps its small, steady work.
I sit in the chair I’ve claimed by habit,
wood worn smooth where my hands rest,
evening gathered around me
like something long acquainted.
Boulevard and Street settle into themselves;
cars passing, then not,
the ordinary hush of having arrived.
Sometimes the past returns
not as memory, but as temperature.
A certain pressure in the chest.
A narrowing.
The old knowledge of how thin a man can feel
and still be standing.
And then - without warning, without effort -
that song comes back.
Not sung.
Not loud.
Just a line of it,
moving through the room the way it once
moved through winter.
Snow on snow.
Hard earth.
It doesn’t ask anything of me.
It never did.
It only reminds me
that naming where you are
can be enough to keep you there.
I know now what I couldn’t then:
that staying is not a lack of courage,
that endurance is not passivity,
that a life can be built
the way a fire is kept -
attention, patience,
no grand gestures.
The world still grinds.
History still shows its teeth.
But I have learned how to sit with that,
how to breathe inside it,
how to offer what I have.
Tonight, it is warmth.
Stillness.
A listening heart.
The song fades, as it always does.
The fire settles.
But something remains,
the same quiet instruction
it gave me all those years ago:
Remain.
And I have been staying ever since.
GBS jr
2003
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