Winter: Woman Looking from the Window at a Spruce Tree

(Winter Morning by Tom Thomson, 1877-1917, Canadian
painter)

“And the sunlight clasps the earth . . .” ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English Romantic poet

WINTER: WOMAN LOOKING FROM THE WINDOW AT A SPRUCE TREE

The sunlight catches in the heart
as if to steer a deeper self to memory
of a time gone, another life of
knowing the self as sunlight.
Not a small shy animal,
not a mystic saint or an
uncounted peasant hoeing corn,
but sunlight, playing alone in winter,
along a branch, moving lightly,
settling lightly on crystallized snow
held gently there, not especially warm,
but light, being right, and not thinking.
The earth was younger then,
in the deep green shine of spruce.

Though not still, self was silent then
and is that now, ineffably held.

~ Maryann Whalen, from Wild Songs: Poems of the Natural World