My sweetie and I have a special New Year's ritual. Every Christmas/Solstice time we decorate the house with greens; cedar, spruce and holly gathered from our own woods. We clear out these decorations, along with the Christmas tree, on New Year's Eve, and light a fire in the meadow with them. Into the fire, along with the greens, go symbols of anything we want/need to let go of in the New Year. We watch the fire until it burns out, toast with some single-malt scotch, and talk about what we want to bring in to our lives for the new year.
Here is one of my favourite poems, by William Carlos Williams. To hear the poet himself reading it, go here.
Here is one of my favourite poems, by William Carlos Williams. To hear the poet himself reading it, go here.
Burning the Christmas Greens
Their time past, pulled down
cracked and flung to the fire
--go up in a roar
All recognition lost, burnt clean
clean in the flame, the green
dispersed, a living red,
flame red, red as blood wakes
on the ash--
and ebbs to a steady burning
the rekindled bed become
a landscape of flame
At the winter's midnight
we went to the trees, the coarse
holly, the balsam and
the hemlock for their green
At the thick of the dark
the moment of the cold's
deepest plunge we brought branches
cut from the green trees
to fill our need, and over
doorways, about paper Christmas
bells covered with tinfoil
and fastened by red ribbons
we stuck the green prongs
in the windows hung
woven wreaths and above pictures
the living green. On the
mantle we built a green forest
and among those hemlock
sprays put a herd of small
white deer as if they
were walking there. All this!
and it seemed gentle and good
to us. Their time past,
relief! The room bare. We
stuffed the dead grate
with them upon the half burnt out
log's smouldering eye, opening
red and closing under them
and we stood there looking down.
Green is a solace
a promise of peace, a fort
against the cold (though we
did not say so) a challenge
above the snow's
hard shell. Green (we might
have said) that, where
small birds hide and dodge
and lift their plaintive
rallying cries, blocks for them
and knocks down
the unseeing bullets of
the storm. Green spruce boughs
pulled down by a weight of
snow--Transformed!
Violence leaped and appeared.
Recreant! roared to life
as the flame rose through and
our eyes recoiled from it.
In the jagged flames green
to red, instant and alive. Green!
those sure abutments . . . Gone!
lost to mind
and quick in the contracting
tunnel of the grate
appeared a world! Black
mountains, black and red--as
yet uncolored--and ash white,
an infant landscape of shimmering
ash and flame and we, in
that instant, lost,
breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.
1944
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