Our first Poem of the Month for 2019 comes from Michelle O’Sullivan’s collection The Flower and the Frozen Sea (2015).

Januaries

1

Broken daylight and the wind singing,
the sun in threads can’t reach these stone-
dense hills or the rain-fed lake.
It’s a charmless fool’s gold.

This settling and unsettling, cold taking
to the skin like lime, white clouds working
themselves loose, began with a lapse,
grey and undefined.

2

Now quieter, away from the lake, tucked
between grass and a shallow river, swift
dusks of green and earth-rich hazels.

A humble brilliance in the cold still here,
this shy-startle and glide of goldfinches —
small fires bringing live coal and jasper.

by Michelle O’Sullivan
The Flower and the Frozen Sea (2015)