/lit/ - Literature

Good evening /lit/, it's your grandfather here again to read you a poem before bed. It's a quiet, cold Saturday night with snow flurries in the air. A time to contemplate how we love.
Here’s a poem by American poet Genevieve Taggard.

Letter in Solitude

Here are autumn certainties:
I will love you and the trees
Go on yellowing and the sun
Stand and pour its radiance down.

Count the seasonal certainties:
I will love you and the trees
Color like a carnival,
Color and refuse to fall,
To show a new aspect of trees
More nearly like themselves than these.

I will love you as I have said:
After all the leaves are shed,
And the sky is fastened down,
And the valley depth is brown,
And the ruts begin to freeze,
There are other certainties.

Surely love you, but with none
Of that radiant tint of sun;
As if a cloud had curled across
The sun, and clung like Iichened moss;

Love you surely, but in a prone
Dogged way, more like a stone;
As if a stone's touch gave a cue
To a clearer love of you.

However absently the eyes
Thinking their inner thoughts may stare
They match within, the sharpened size
Of hillshapes in the cutting air.

And so, by seeing uncovered ground
And outlines gaunter all the time
I see love also winter-bound
And think more simply into rhyme.

And since love gets its tempered sense
From the large fact of altering earth,
I love the winter, stubborn, dense,
And love the storm my love is worth.

Good night friends, and sleep well.