Visit Linda at Teacher Dance for the Poetry Friday Roundup.
Winter nights at the farm are eerily quiet. Save for the occasional wind or ice storm, the farmhouse is a cocoon of silence; the pitter pat of Cat on his nightly prowl, or of Sophie as she pads around the wood stoves in search of the coziest spot, is just about the extent of what constitutes “noise” once evening falls.
You’d think that the creatures whose presence we had felt when our windows were open had simply packed their things and moved away for the winter, as many of our neighbors have.
Morning, however, reveals all sorts of activity: raccoon tracks all the way up to the back door, deer prints crisscrossing the pastures, cat prints hinting at a new resident in the big barn. Sophie tears around taking inventory, outraged at these interlopers on her watch, the “worlds of play” in Sarton’s poem:
“December Moon” by May Sarton
Snow silence fills my head
After I leave the window.
Hours later near dawn When I look down again The whole landscape has changed The perfect surface gone Criss-crossed and written on Where the wild creatures ranged
While the moon rose and shone.