Midwinter

Emotions wear no warmth.
Heart and mind march downhill to midwinter.

Coffee left still, outside overnight.
Living is acrid, cold, something to be
Flushed away at first light,
A task untouched when we had time,
Untold tale of midwinter.

A trail of cups is cast behind, moving on,
Plans promised, deficient or defective,
Words not sung, vows not voiced,
Love too late disclosed, lost,
Lying banked against midwinter.

All our springs flanked by forward planning,
Dreaming times, driving futures.
Where will we go? What shall we become?
Not a child, not tween nor teen,
Bouquets have blown over midwinter.
 
Summers overblown with business,
Decisive busyness, and deeds
Done to rationalise their doing.
Careers and cares and children,
Celebrating Christmas in midwinter.

Autumn awaiting, reliving recollections,
Filing away our photos. 
Browsing books replaces reading,
Postponing for the perfect portent, 
Bolting away blind, anticipating midwinter.

Tears are easy to find, eyes fill
When you are not watching.
Companions constant half a century,
Or clear yet complete though young in years,
Arrive and abscond, stall, and still, in midwinter.

Meals to fill the freezer, camouflaging confused chatter:
“My rabbit died suddenly; God needed another angel.
There’s a new star in the sky tonight.”
Friends who love quietly linger and abide, 
Always present, allies against midwinter.

Tears are easy to find, spent when unforeseen.
No one knows what words to voice,
Pain pulls us in and pummels us,
Hemmed in and gathered by grief.
Gap-gutted, we fear midwinter.

Why don’t the tears now attend,
To shield us when we suffer?
When they do,
They freeze our hearts,
Funnelling down to midwinter.

    (For Carmen, May 2022)

Note 1:

Midwinter was triggered by the death of one of the most impressive young ladies I’ve had the privilege to know. Carmen Bagnulo was just a few months shy of her 22nd birthday and died as a result of the cancer she’d been diagnosed with.

I first met her, and her family (Joanne, Sharif, Tristan, Carmen, and Layla), when we were invited around to dinner. Chris & Tristan were in the same class at St. Agatha’s, and Carmen would have been 9 at the time. The boys took off somewhere (probably playing Gameboy or similar), Juliet & Joanne & Sharif sat around talking, with a very young Layla at their side. And Carmen & I folded origami - an instant hit for both of us.

After the boys went to different high schools, we lost track of the family for a few years but managed to catch up again. After the boys finished their HSC, I rang Joanne to find out how Tristan had gone, and what he was doing. Very well, and engineering. I offered my services if he ran into problems with 1st-year uni maths, but he didn’t think he needed it. But Carmen piped up and asked if I could tutor her, as she’d missed a few concepts at the start of year 11. I was happy to help, and we ended up as Facebook friends, as that was how we organised lesson times.

Carmen was a delight, both as a student and just as a person. Intelligent and quick to pick up on things, we solved her maths problems in the first lesson (reduction of surds). The text was not terribly obvious to her and I thought badly written, so I explained it differently and she got it straight away. A few practice examples and then a quick look at whatever else she was doing and that was the end of maths tutoring. We worked through another 2 lessons, mainly physics which she largely had covered, then on the last day, we looked at the other problem. In chemistry, redox reactions are often badly taught. I remember initially struggling with them 50 years ago. So again, I took a different tack from the textbook, just watching the electrons. When I explained it, she asked “Is that all there is to it?", and when I said yes she just giggled for several minutes. When I asked her to work out a second example, she picked up a pen, and just giggled again. End of tutoring job for me, but fortunately not for our friendship. . Facebook gave me the opportunity to watch her grow through her school years and beyond, and applaud her success. She was doing well at Uni and the future looked to be hers. And then she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma and a limited future.

How helpless we felt. Juliet could talk to Carmen and her family about medical things and we could love and support her and her family, but all you can do is hope against hope that treatment helps, and osteosarcoma in young people is extremely nasty. I would drop off some homegrown vegetables when I could and Joanne gave us a word picture of coming home to find Carmen snacking on radishes and snow peas “like Malteasers.” Every time I grow them from that date, they are forever “Carmen’s radishes”, no matter who gets them. I was also blessed enough to have a couple of chats on FB Messages several months before she died. A Goldilocks “just right” relationship distant enough that she didn’t feel like she would burden me too much, but close to unburden herself (and end one chat with “Now that’s enough victim behaviour for me today) if required. And then, just like that, she was gone. For a tribute to her as a contribution to her funereal, that month of interactions ended up in a prose-poem called "Carmen's Smile". And a year or so later, a brevity called "Osteosarcoma"

I’m not sure quite what it was about her, but Carmen inspired poetry in me - I woke up one night about 3 months after her death with a poem called Midwinter in my head, and I got up immediately and wrote it down. Then spent several days/weeks getting it just right, because Carmen and those who loved her deserved the very best I could manage. Her family and a few friends got a copy of the poem at the time of Carmen’s 6 month anniversary. But I wanted to do more, and have it read properly. My lovely friend and “2nd daughter” Sammy Ying and I had had discussions about poetry previously and we agreed that poetry (and plays) are meant to be read aloud, so I co-opted her from her busy schedule and we did a couple of takes of her reciting the poem. Then I mixed in some of my own with the best parts of hers and put a music track underneath that suited the mood. Thank you Sammy so much for all your help and all your love😍

The poem references all of the friends we’ve lost to cancer since 2016: Malcolm Freeman (2016), SaraJoy Ly (2020), Mary O’Connor (2020), Carmen (2021), and Malcolm Bocking (2022), as well as another, Geraldine Finnon (2021) who died of a heart attack. And there are lines in the poem, direct quotes, that came after our beloved Jessica died. I hope it touches your heartstrings because all these deaths (and others) continue to touch ours.

Final addendum - Juliet was the sixth person to get cancer in that short few years (a rare variant of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma) and the only one who didn’t die of it. Instead, her leaky tricuspid valve caught up with her in January 2013. So I was able to play the recording of Midwinter at the reception after her funeral. But because I wanted her funeral to not end at that level of grief, I then added something more hopeful. You will find Life Is The Prayer under the “Of Love …” section should you wish to read it.

The poem was entered in a contest "Unawarded Poetry" where it won an Honourable Mention on 1 July 2024; a second in "Anything Goes (Except Haiku)" on 14 August; and Silver in "Give Your HM'S a Fighting Chance #11" on 17 August.

Note 2:

I was quite happy with the original poem that had come to me for Midwinter. If I published it alone, I would not have been ashamed of it. But nearly everything can be improved by adding the 9 parts perspiration to that original inspiration.

The first thing I noticed was that I had quite a few 5 line verses. Spring and summer were 2 & 3 lines respectively and needed expansion. So the poem moved to that 2 line intro, and I each verse ended with a line moving to midwinter. Sammy asked what midwinter was when we recorded it and I called it grief then, but it is desolation and nadir as well.

Having set my sights on 5 lines per verse, the form became easier. One of the last lines in one verse coincidentally had a word in the middle that linked to a word that rhymed in the middle of the first line of the next, so that got built in all the way through.

The final edits were building in alliteration. Old English poetry was much less reliant on rhyme but strongly driven by alliteration, so I kept going back and seeing where I could change and add words that used alliteration but also drove the rhythm. Assonance is there too: outside overnight; while untouched/untold has both.

I've kept copies of all the changes in this one - if you look at the "original poem", you will find multiple drafts. I hope you find them enlightening. I kept them because I found them enlightening to how I do what I do - I don't often pay much attention, I just do it.

Draft 1

There is no warmth
The heart runs down hill to midwinter,
Unfinished coffee left outside overnight.
Living is acrid, cold, something to be
Flushed away in the morning,
A task left uncompleted when you had time,
Running off to midwinter.

We leave a trail of cups behind us as we move,
Things that might have been done,
Words that should have been said,
Love not finally told.

All our springs full of forward planning,
Dreaming times, wishing and hoping.
Summers overblown 
With business and busyness and doing
For just the sake of doing.

Autumn stands, holding on to memories,
Filing away our photos, 
Cataloguing our books instead of reading them,
Holding back for just the right moment, 
Running down to midwinter.

Tears are easy to find, they come
When you are not looking.
Friends of half a lifetime,
Half a century or only half a decade,
Appear and vanish unannounced.
Meals to fill the freezer, words to fill embarrassed silence
A trusted few just to sit in silence, waiting.

Tears are easy to find when not expected.
“My rabbit died suddenly,”
“There’s a new star in the sky tonight”
“God needed another angel”
They don’t know what words to say, because nothing is right to say,
Nothing is real except the grief.

Why don’t the tears come,
To shield us when we need them?
They freeze our hearts,
Running down to midwinter.