Everything on my usual walk is muted now, this last day of November, the short days and nights not long enough for the amount of sleep my body craves. And the only being that calls my eye in the drab landscape - winterberry, winter berries in the wetlands where I tromp in my thick sneakers over the hay and leaves hoping to stay dry while I get close enough to experience their inspiring energy against the cold and dark. Home, I went searching for a poem to teach me more about the spirit of winter BERRIES – enlivening the swamp, and fortunately, found this sonnet by John Gray. I will record it onto my cell phone and listen to it as I walk the long short days into December toward solstice.

A Winterberry Sonnet, by John Gray

Winterberry disrupts the frozen curse.
My vision’s charmed by tiny blobs of red
Between fine-toothed leaves, above a thick bed
Of snow that baits low branches to immerse
In mounds, but they refute its chill or worse,
Cold’s inference that matter should be dead
Or trapped indoors. This brave bush flaunts instead
Its  rare December spring, bold universe.

Like holly, I sense bloom in darker thought
That would overwhelm me sure, were there not
Deep in my heart, a priceless maxim taught
By love, to recall what must not be forgot,
That bleakness is mere background, a mind ought
To imitate a winterberry’s lot.

All photos and text copyright 2017 Kelly DuMar, unless otherwise attributed