Large Fierce Mammal

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Winter in Nova Scotia will arrive at twenty-eight minutes past noon Atlantic Standard Time today when the Solstice heralds the start of the long, slow plod to Spring. For those of us of whatever species who haven’t already migrated or gone into hibernation, this is a time of uncertainty tempered with incipient joy.

The Black Bear sow impregnated in June will give birth in her den in January, and nurse her offspring in her warmth as the very dead of Winter holds sway outside.

The pregnant White-Tailed Deer doe who survives the Winter will carry her fawn through the snows to late May to early June.

As to Human kind, Winter will bring challenges at the end of which the result will lie on a spectrum ranging from the greatest of joys to the gravest of sorrows, and in this it stands as no different from any other aspect of life but for bearing a greater degree of urgency and inexorable deadliness in the face of any vulnerability.

And so it goes.

We’ll start this year’s celebration with a poem that first appeared here on the Christmas Day of 2012. Many of you will never have seen it, while still others were drunk enough not to remember it. Whatever, let it stand as tonight’s greeting and in contrast to what follows.

Here again is …

A Song of Winter

By LFM

The equinox of Autumn
Sees the harvest gathered in.
All store rooms packed, all larders full,
Each cellar, loft, and bin.

A bounty bought with sweat and toil,
With dash of blood and tear.
Long days afield preparing for
The shortest of the year.

Each morn the sun must struggle
Just to bring the light of day,
And daily weakens in the fight
To keep the night at bay.

Such knowing weighs the brows of Men,
As ice doth bend the bough,
With naught but snow to meet the scythe,
And frozen earth the plough.

Yet glorious day, the Solstice comes
With casting off of dooms!
Now’s the time to feast and drink!
To plant strong bairns in wombs!

For now is seen the Sun’s rebirth
And how the Night doth flee,
Giving back the land to let
Another harvest be.