Writers’ Weir: Just Before Winter

This next windstorm

will blow the last leaves from my alder.

My view of the inlet will no longer

afford the perspective of a foreground

and the little brown birds and

squirrels and woodpeckers

will not be able to chatter, nest and hide.

A humpback rises hugely

out of his first element

and plunges back in a personal tide.

Three coho lie lifeless on the picnic table

ready for the knife.

 

Deep in the woods

the ferns are not brown,

but capture the autumn light

as it is broken in the fall

through the evergreen canopy.

Osmotically, they gather into themselves

the soft, cold light from the hours left

between dawn and dusk

 

like long abandoned saints so old

they have become a stonehenge

made of faith in circadian rhythms

 

and glow with interior illumination.

 

• Sarah Williams experiences poetry as clear, brave, passionate speech. For 38 years she has lived all around Alaska, mostly in a small village. What she has experienced she finds best expressed in a poem.

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