But UD likes this one best, by Jon Lang.
Before we go there: My own winter night sky tonight – viewed from my back deck in Garrett Park, Maryland – is blackly clear, with a large, full, bright moon. This cosmic clarity comes equipped, this evening, with very cold, very awakening, air. Like all those winter night poets, I’m stirred, and I’m lifted, out here, off the earth, to something acutely articulate; something post-human, and post-humous… Yet as it happens, I don’t know what the universe is saying — I only know I’m exposed, in my coatless, ghosty condition, to its voice. Wallace Stevens hears something of this with similar recognition and confusion at the seashore:
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Winter Night
How often we draw back, detached from the world
Like a star, and thinking the mind a pure space
Imagine our fate somehow suspended – almost
As if, like a far eye, or a small fist
Of light, we might take the whole of it, coldly, in.
But ah, what a show … for nothing really stops –
And the further we fade, the more the smallest pain
Heightens, iced to a moon’s edge. O, could we just
See! How even without us the vanishing earth
Goes on, child without mother, bearing itself
Blindly toward spring! Would we still, like gods,
Think ourselves beyond it all? Now, shrinking
Within, we only at best mimick the dead,
Who have earned with a life that richer, darker distance.
December 11th, 2023 at 11:48AM
Greetings from Norfolk. In 1981 I set several poems by a poet of this name with titles beginning with “Winter” used adjectivally (e.g., Winter Mysteries). If this is the same poet, I would appreciate it if you could give me any information you might have about him, at the email address VFrost2468 (at) gmail (dot) com. Many thanks.
December 12th, 2023 at 8:17AM
Hello: Thanks for writing – I don’t know anything about this poet, I’m afraid. I found the poem online and liked it, but went no further. Best, UD