Winter Soltice Moonrise by Di

The sky and the snow have certainly put on a show here on the East Coast. Huge drifts of the accumulated 24″-29″ look like sand dunes, if sand dunes were white. While neighbors used snowplows, my brother and I cleared out his driveway. Okay, I did 1/16 of a quarter of the work, but I certainly lent moral support.

My niece says, rightly, in reading a bit of my manuscript fit for her eyes, “but where’s the problem?” Being a great reader, she knows good stories need a problem, something to drive the plot along. So far, all she’s seen is a little boy waiting for a ferryboat to dock. Could he get lost? Kidnapped? But in grown-up stories, these are frightening matters. She looks at me with exasperation. “That’s why it’s a story.”

She has just read the The Secret Garden which not only has secrets but mysteries. What’s the difference? Secrets are revealed and mysteries,solved, I guess. A boy waiting for a ferryboat to dock. It does. Passengers emerge, hugs all around. Then, everyone has coffee. That’s how the story is going. What is hidden? What is lost? What transpires? Well, the coffee is good.

Above, from my dear intrepid photographer friend, who sent this picture above at 6:00 AM. There’s mystery, there’s change. Let me google a moon poem( from The Poetry Foundation)…  Here is one by a rare and wonderful poet, who hopefully might forgive my formatting.

Burning the Old Year

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner Books, 1995)