Saturday, December 21, 2013

Winter Solstice



It's Winter Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere--the shortest day, and this year, a very cold one. It's 2 degrees F as I type this. I join many of you in being thankful that the days will start getting longer. Gimme sunshine!

To mark the occasion, I share with you a poem based on riding the school bus to school for 6 years through the countryside.



A Rural Ride

Cold winter mornings,
The yellow school bus
bumps along gravel roads,
loading children,
one farmstead at a time.
The sun pinks the sky,
Sheens the snow,
Steams the lake.
In the pastures, cattle’s breath

Rises like prayers.

copyright 2013, Jane Heitman Healy, all rights reserved


(photo by ed_needs_a_bicycle http://www.flickr.com/photos/omcoc/8315302454/)

Please share your winter memories in the comments section!

This poem also lives on poet David L. Harrison's Word of the Month blog, where everyone is invited to try writing and posting a poem based on a word that changes each moth. Come and play! 

(Internet Explorer 11 seems to have hijacked my Thanksgiving post. If any of you have experience in dealing with IE11 and blogger, let me know. So, I'm trying this on Chrome and hoping for a better result.)