As merry a Christmas as we can make it

Well, Christmas in lockdown is looming and there's nothing we can do about it. I hope that whatever the year has brought you, there was some joy. For me I found the most joy in the last month, December. November I was shortlisted for the Hedgehog Poetry Dialect pamphlet competition, which was bittersweet to say the least. The months previous I had various poetry successes. But December brought me not only acceptances for the coming year, and published poems a plenty, but the chance to share pages in journals with my own daughter - in fact in one publication she actually beat me with three poems to my two! And I have never been prouder, or happier. I have no desire to push her into writing this young (she's only nine, ten in a few days time, eek!) but I do want her to know that writing is a valid, worthwhile occupation. Something I wish I'd known when I was at school. I think she knows it now, :)

This poem was first published in Sarasvati, and it's for my little one - born on the solstice.

Tamar’s Poem 

Born on the morning of the Death of the Day, 

we spent the longest night, milk-scented, body-close,  

and when the weak New Sun was delivered in the last hours  

of that Long Night, we blinked our sleepless eyes,  

unwrapped a new world - the first to see it, you  

cannot remember it; I will never forget it.