Midwinter

A poem

Before gods were named, before the year was a circle,
we were warm animals with winter in our bones.
We watched the sun limp south like wounded deer,
and measured our fear by astronomies unknown.

Someone struck a flint.
And uttered, not a prayer,
but a simple fact shared in the dark…
It comes back.

—

A child drags a stick through dust.
A line to mark noon’s shadow.
Another for yesterday’s sun.
A third for the day before,
because children love rules.

No temples yet. Only repetition.
Only the sky keeping its hopeful promise.
We track the heavens dancing angles
and learned how not to die.

—

A hill opens its throat to the solstice sunrise.
A corridor of rock drinks the first flood of gold.
Inside, faces flicker, smoke-smudged and wide-eyed,
as if light itself had returned from exile.

Someone weeps.
A child laughs.
Somebody hands bread to the stranger,
because the sun has chosen to stay.

—

Rome in winter: wreaths, dice, shouting in the streets,
a holiday that smells like wine and rebellion.
Masters pour for servants. Rules loosen like belts.
It’s not holiness, but survival.
Joy as insulation.

Wherever the world runs cold, the same pattern emerges:
Feast, fire, family and friends.
Call it what you like.
We all mark the same proof:

That we made it this far.

—

Yule logs hiss and crackle like old gods clearing their throats.
Green boughs indoors; smuggled past winter’s border guards.
Solstice.
The sun pauses.
We stare it down.
We remember it owes us a spring.

We need not agree on names,
to agree on that primal moment.
That hinge in the year,
where despair stops gaining ground.

—

A stable, a chorus of breath in cold air,
a story of light arriving as flesh.
We argue dates for centuries,
scholarship and politics in their Sunday best,
but listen… underneath the theology,
that old midwinter hunger is there.

A reason to gather.
A reason to hope.
A reason to call the returning sun
a sign.

—

Calendars become instruments.
Kings measure taxes by them.
Priests measure sin.
And farmers measure survival.

Festivals get uniforms.
And songs sanctioned verses.
And yet still, in every language,
somebody, somewhere lights a flame
and whispers to their child
that the cold will not last.

—

Open-plan office, December, fluorescent noon.
A PowerPoint slide: SEASONAL GREETINGS INITIATIVE.
A committee has audited the nouns.

“Christmas” is considered too specific.
“Festive” is safer, like decaf and rounded corners.
There is a risk assessment for tinsel.
And a meeting about mince pies.

As if joy could summon litigation
if named too precisely.

—

A Sikh neighbour drops off sweets in a crackly box.
A Hindu family strings lights like patient constellations.
A Jewish friend texts a photo of candles stepping upward.
A Muslim colleague says “Merry Christmas” first, smiling,
not because he must, but because kindness travels.

The sky cares not for our beliefs.
The sun still performs its quiet turnaround,
right on schedule,
without a press release.

—

Could we celebrate like the ancients?
Not as a competition of banners,
nor a sanitised memo,
but the shared reality of the heavens.

Gathering under our honest differences,
we can call it whatever we want,
for we all celebrate the same single truth:

The Earth leans away, then back.

—

On a future night, in a city that learned harmony,
a plaza fills with music, friendship and food.
There are candles, lanterns, LEDs, fires in bowls.
The trappings change, but the gesture is eternal.

Someone recites a prayer.
Someone recites a poem.
Someone says nothing at all,
just holds a hand, because the year is heavy.

And above them all, the indifferent generous geometry.
The tilt, the orbit, the slow return.
A clock none of us invented,
yet all of us can read.

Then with the oldest language we have,
that of fire answering darkness,
we agree, if only for a while,
to be one species looking up,
celebrating, without argument,
without disclaimer, and saying…

It comes back.

We can too.