Day Merrill
Jonesing for January
So they say this is Christmas
or perhaps a late Hanukkah,
the gift delivered as it was by a Jewish lawyer.
A gift of betrayal in the end,
which is what all autocrats reap in the end.
Of course, this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is end of the beginning and the beginning of
the frustrating middle, like that long, slaggy post-holiday gap
with nothing to look forward to for months.
This middle-born in the wee hours of November 7
(and dragged out for weeks like Orthodox Christmas)
marked not a New Year (that will come)
so much as a Solstice:
that moment we turned our faces toward the future,
lighting a single candle (we dare not call it hope)
rather than just cursing the darkness.
We will still march and rail, rant and post
but mostly we’ll muddle through drift and puddle
in a season of waiting more pregnant than Advent
until we arrive at some sign of Spring.
That is enough, for now. Winter is coming.
Day Merrill’s poems have appeared in The Binnacle, Halcyon Magazine, HIV Here & Now, Poems in the Aftermath, The Journal of Contemporary Rural Social Work, Tin Roof Press and Quick Brown Fox as well as in the Collingwood Public Library Writers Group anthology Musings. After a career as an English teacher and a university administrator, she became a career coach. Raised in New England and a former long-time resident of New York City, Merrill lives on the shores of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay in Collingwood, Ontario, with her husband and a rescued dog and cat.
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