New Poem: Winter Light

An Advent verse for the shortest day of the year

Today, the 21st of December, is the briefest day of sunlight in the year. Here in Oxford, the sun rises at 8.10am, and sets at 3.47pm, allowing just less than eight full hours of daylight. Blink, or spend a bit too long writing Substack posts on your computer, and you just might miss it.

As it happens, today is also the day which the church calendar in many traditions associates with the Advent antiphon, O Oriens. The ‘O’ antiphons are seven texts used at Vespers (evening prayer) for the last seven days of Advent leading up to Christmas. Each antiphon offers a reflection on a different title of Christ: O Sapientia (Wisdom); O Clavis David (Key of David); and so on. It is no accident that the antiphon for the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere is the O Oriens – literally, ‘O rising.’ In some translations, it is rendered ‘radiant dawn’; in others, ‘morning star.’ On this briefest span of light, when the shadows gather most readily, O Oriens praises the Christ whose light is stronger than the darkness, and brings the dawn of new life:

O Dayspring, splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness: Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

I love the light of winter, which has its own unique role to play in the variety of creational luminance expressed in the different seasons. Today I share a new poem I’ve written for this shortest day of the year, reflecting on Winter Light. I posted it as a note a few days ago, and now I’m delighted to share it with my subscribers as well. I hope it is an encouragement to you as you faithfully wait out the final few days before Christmas! Warmest wishes of the season to you my friends.

Winter Light

Joel Clarkson

The winter’s light holds beauty of its own

That needs no other season to resolve

Its radiance, stretched thin upon the graft

Of harrowed branches, stripped and petrified,

No longer confident to sweep and sway

Before the aspect of that gentler brightness

Whose gaze had lingered long upon their raiment

In younger hours of the year. They fear

And fret, ashamed of their own nakedness,

The crushing, cruel indignity of time

That rendered them bereft of all the glory

That once illuminated all their thought

Into the verdancy of emerald

And gold. And so, they open up their hands

Relinquishing their hold, receiving mercy,

Allowing all the fierce and piercing kindness

Of that which, once, they took as only trifle,

The fleeting glances of an erstwhile lover,

To droop itself upon their crooked shoulders

And cover them, when all their foolish pride

Has rendered them alone and full of grief.

For winter light holds beauty of its own,

That lies beyond the end of bloom and leaf.

It clothes the dying world, and lays upon it

The promise of an everliving wreath.