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Merry Christmas


                                                             "Fireside" 1956 by Winifred Nicholson


New Year Snow by Frances Horowitz

For three days we waited,
a bowl of dull quartz for sky.
At night the valley dreamed of snow,
lost Christmas angels with dark-white wings
flailing the hills.
I dreamed a poem, perfect
as the first five-pointed flake,
that melted at dawn:
a Janus-time
to peer back at guttering dark days,
trajectories of the spent year.
And then snow fell.
Within an hour, a world immaculate
as January’s new-hung page.
We breathe the radiant air like men new-born.
The children rush before us.
As in a dream of snow
we track through crystal fields
to the green horizon
and the sun’s reflected rose.
 
It is no surprise that Frances Horowitz's publisher, Bloodaxe, chose a painting by Winifred Nicholson to adorn the cover of her Collected Poems. 

Both were attentive fathomers of particular places, then when attentively seen become translucent to glimmerings of transcendence. The boundaries between inside, warmth, and blanketing cold blur in Winifred's painting, worlds enfold worlds. The boundary in Frances' poem is temporal - the time of looking back - guttering dark, channels of accomplishments and failures - is teased into a blanket white future, awaiting hopeful imprint, where innocence treads first in wondering excitement. 

Working with people in prison, years back, I noticed that a sign of change not being in prospect was the person's declaration of guilt. This puzzled me, at first, you thought acknowledgment would be hopeful until I realized guilt was always backward facing, trapped in the past, and always about 'me'. My identity is wrapped in guilt, a compelling egotism awaiting its allotted forgiveness. 

Remorse, on the other hand, was qualitatively different. It did not announce itself except in the person's actions towards change, leaning into a future that was white with possibilities, waiting to be written anew.  "As in a dream of snow we track through crystal fields to the green horizon and the sun’s reflected rose."

This seems the perfect Christmas theme as a child comes to write us anew - fully aware of our pasts yet leaving them there - inviting us to step out, in the light of eternity, always new. The simplest thing in the world that we endlessly complicate (to partially quote Rowan Williams)! 

So more innocence of childhood rushing into new snow is needed:-) since the paths of presumed realism seem to lead us only back into the trajectories of past years' failures!

Meanwhile, the renewing work with people in prison goes on, refreshingly, https://www.theppt.org.uk/ and into its thirty-sixth year and just as the budget looked wobbly (not for the first time), the founder's kind niece and those innocent Hobbits (a.k.a the Tolkien Trust) came to the rescue, so the future brightened, as it can!

Merry Christmas and a blanket white New Year on which to write anew ..

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