Winter happens like a secret

I found this poem in January 2022 and have been saving it to post on the shortest day of the year. For me it captures the beauty in the bleakness of this time of year. And the language! 'Winter happens like a secret we've to keep yet never understand' feels like the core of a fairy tale. 

Beautiful. Happy Solstice, friends.

At the Solstice

We say Next time we’ll go away.
But then the winter happens, like a secret

We’ve to keep yet never understand,
As daylight turns to cinema once more:

A lustrous darkness deep in ice-age cold,
And the print in need of restoration

Starting to consume itself
With snowfall where no snow is falling now.

"Winter Solstice 2014" by Jon Bunting is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Or could it be a cloud of sparrows, dancing
In the bare hedge that this gale of light

Is seeking to uproot? Let it be sparrows, then,
Still dancing in the blazing hedge,

Their tender fury and their fall,
Because it snows, because it burns.

Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians (London, 2015)