What the Muses Leave Behind

We’re diving into deep night again, into a velvet star speckled pocket lusciously cold as a watercress pool, edges laced in frost. We can’t help but fill it with gloomy news of economies kaput, mothers murdered, insurgent storms. All set a perfect stage for this longest night with shadows, shadows everywhere - even the moon eclipses. It’s a firefly called hope, napping in the bottom of Pandora’s golden box that sustains us now. We are preserved for summer – for farmers’market and mayfly hatches and Perseid showers. So today let winter hold our sadness. We’ll feed the fire, sing to children, stir the soup. Tears and worry ride better on the dappled gray fog than on our hearts. When Earth bears everything the January skies can bleed spring again.

Whose turn is it to watch for paradise? - Sarah Ann Winn With first slip of daylight, I let loose hounds of dark roast to a  growling grinder, cracking the quiet of thick frost and apricot overcast.   My black dog stretches in sun salute as we meet a crescent moon. She looks a bit ragged and thin. Winter slows many things, sap and squirrels, but not the brooding of poets and farmers - incessant is their surveillance.  The moon needs a nap, drapes her face with cirrus clouds; tries to overlook the millstones: neap tides, menses, frazzled lunatics – tugging, tugging, tugging. No wonder Selene stumbles narcoleptic spring to fall. No wonder with each waning crescent, her sagacious gifts surrender to rain. She needs a nap. There are blueprints to dream for April,  and a naked winter world expects night escort, November to Spring.   No wonder Diana croons in the vernal chirr of peeper and toad. Even beside groundhogs, she’d lay, seek a sluggish ecl