Equinox

The Vernal Equinox. Yet I am still standing at the tip of Sandy Hirst in December on midwinter day, the Winter Solstice. The low sun gleams through broken cloud and glimmers across the quiet estuary. I scratch a few notes in my sketchbook and take some photographs. Later, at home, I do a series of watercolour paintings, one of which I left you with last time. Here are a couple more.

And then there is this poem. I see from my notebook that it is dated Dec. 2016. It was a time when the news was filled with images of hapless refugees — Syrians, Kurds, Afghans and others — scrambling ashore from dilapidated boats and battered dinghies onto the shores of Greek islands. These images stuck in my mind and somehow leaked into the poem.

Winter Solstice on Sandy Hirst

At the lowest ebb of the year I track
the strandline on the spit and there they are,
washing ashore, shapes in the bubbling foam,
froth-forms, these souls migrating back.

They tumble over each other in waves,
scramble up the shingle and stand
bewildered, seeking asylum in the dark vegetation.

One in plastic sandals scurries into dense buckthorn.
Another, hooded, crouches among driftwood,
ear to his mobile. “We thought we would be free,
but no, the tide has thrown us up again…”

I would throw my arms wide and welcome them
but there are ghosts enough in my draughty hangar.
Besides, the sea-mist has swallowed them,
and on this shifting sandbank when the sun’s
an ochre smudge in a charcoal sky
the mind’s a windy place, its echoes cavernous.

*

The Winter and Summer Solstices, the Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes, solar markers of the year’s turning. I underline them in my diary. Why? Perhaps for the same reason I listen to the Shipping Forecast every morning and have a chart of the sea areas on my wall. And a coloured Geological Map of the British Isles, and next to that a pleasing spiral diagram showing the Earth’s evolution over the past four and a half billion years. I don’t know where this puts me on the autistic spectrum, but maybe these props give some sense of location in time and space to an errant soul such as mine.

When I lived in Wakefield I often wandered in the Washlands, an old industrial wasteland gradually returning to nature — ‘edgelands’ as such places are sometimes known. Over the course of a year, for each of those defining points of the annual round I wrote a poem. And later, as part of my final exhibition for an art course I took at Wakefield College, I made a set of four complementary paintings which I hung with the poems alongside. The paintings are 60cm square, on hardboard, primed with emulsion and glue into which bits of vegetation, ash and bits of rust from the location were embedded. The painting was a mixture of oils and acrylic…..so mixed media in a very real sense!

Vernal Equinox

Something like the warmth
I feel on my back
is breaking new ground.

It touches the edgeland’s
bleached parchment
with nerves of crimson dogwood,
thrusts through the grit
tiny viridian warheads.

Each bud is making a fresh bid.
Birchwood and osier stretch
from their trance.
The pale reedbed is learning to breathe.

Beyond my shadow
quick rain tempers the light
but there is no going back.
Under my feet
earth, root and sap become articulate.

Now, as the year tilts,
the small lake cups its hands
and waits for the sun.

Summer Solstice

The edgelands have swung
into cavernous light,
slung below the sun
that hangs like a hawk
in this blue heat.

Fixed in its stare
the day stands still.
My shadow is a shadow of itself.

Yet the small lake simmers —
flies mesmerised in their own static,
the dragonfly’s azure cursor,
swallows banking on rims of air.

Beyond the leafage,
shade deepening into shade,
I catch the weir’s white thunder,
watch a stir of gulls on the landfill.

From its high,
time bends through its prism,
tugs the earthswell after it.
Between vapour-trails
the sun begins its swoop.

Autumnal Equinox

A damp squall rattles the reedbed,
rakes the briars below the pylon,
shivers the small lake.

The trees are shedding light
in the ashfields.
The edgelands echo
the clank of freight over the viaduct
and weigh the hours.

An alchemy is burning
leaf to gold, whispering
a ceremonial passing….
flickering bronze….
banners at sunset….

Sudden flare of rowan in the wine-
dark hedgerow. Astonishment
of Michaelmas blue.

Then day gives night the nod
dreaming of hearth-glow,
hollows into dusk,
sweet smoke on its breath.

Winter Solstice

It is ice still
and the small lake is locked
in its dream.
Mirrored birch and willow
are frozen silver.

Frost holds the year’s breath.

The sun has tracked me here
eye-level along
the narrow wood, stealthy
among dark branches.

This is the deepest it will get.

Standing at the edge,
I listen to the silence tighten
until at noon
the sun leaks its red
teardrop down the panes of ice
to dissolve at my feet

and my long shadow is behind me.

Back where I started, with another, different Winter Solstice. But time revolves and now it is the Vernal Equinox. Shelley, in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’, wrote “O, Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” In these days of climate emergency and pandemic, perhaps the question is not as rhetorical as it seems. For now, though, back on Sandy Hirst, the signs are there. I am happy to post this on what is reckoned to be the first day of Spring.

Vernal Equinox

….on the long spit strung
with buckthorn and marram
and the brimful estuary ringing
to curlew cry.

The year is tipping
yet the freshness is still deep down
wrapped tight….
soon it whispers soon soon

Late afternoon
in that equivocal light
and the salt wind in the grasses catches
its breath the tide tilting
weighing up the sea swell.

My footprints ebbing back into the dark.

Ahead, the empty wave-washed sand.