A poem for the beginning of winter by Timothy Steele

• Toward the Winter Solstice
• Although the roof is just a story high,
• It dizzies me a little to look down.
• I lariat-twirl the rope of Christmas lights
• And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
• A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
• Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
• The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
• Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

• Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
• And call up commendations or critiques.
• I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
• Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
• We all are conscious of the time of year;
• We all enjoy its colorful displays
• And keep some festival that mitigates
• The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

• Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
• But UPS vans now like magi make
• Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
• Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
• The desert lifts a full moon from the east
• And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
• And valets at chic restaurants will soon
• Be tending flocks of cars and SUV’s.

• And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
• The fan palms scattered all across town stand
• More calmly prominent, and this place seems
• A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
• This house might be a caravansary,
• The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
• Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
• And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.

• Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
• Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
• It’s comforting to look up from this roof
• And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
• To recollect that in antiquity
• The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
• And that, in the Orion Nebula,
• From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

Timothy Steele (b. 1948) is an American poet and one of the leading proponents of the New Formalism, which seeks to return to the traditional structures and devices of poetry, including meter, rhyme, and traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet. He is well known for his critical work on English prosody, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and his critique of modern “free verse,” Missing Measures. Steele was one of the founding members of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, which helped give birth to the modern revival of formal verse. While Steele has generally rejected the idea that his poetry is part of the New Formalist movement (which suggests an interest in style over substance), critics have noted that his work almost exclusively employs full rhymes (vs. half rhymes), and rarely uses metrical substitutions or enjambment — rendering his poems more formal than those of most New Formalists.