Ten weeks to Christmas

Store leaf fire in your eyes
against the dark.

Steep the brightness of berries
in syrup and wine.

Trade green for gold, steadily,
like the silver birch.

Look across the valley to the other side
where March waves to you.

Listen to the year’s slow exhalation.
Christmas is the new breath.

Down in the land of short days
and long nights, light awaits.

Sarah Mnatzaganian is an Anglo Armenian poet. Her award-winning Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter inspired a song cycle by Noah Max. Poems have appeared in PN Review, The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, and Poetry Archive Now!

Towards the Solstice

owls fly closer in December twilight,
call to each other across the garden.
Winter tide floods in
showering us with a spray of stars.

As we retreat to our light
and fireside, owl-hoot pushes
into spaces we’ve vacated.
They’ve waited for this

watching in the clairvoyance
of darkness. Their voices tremble
as they listen to replies
and that’s when we know

the place was always full of them.
Dusk brings them close,
the long dark
when what we don’t see

is bright to them. They sound out night,
later ejecting its indigestibles,
intricate with bone and fur,
from their gizzards.

Rebecca Gethin‘s latest title is Snowlines. More here: rebeccagethin.wordpress.com

The Shortest Day

Dawn leaked through the third-floor window,
a thin ribbon of light trying its luck
against the grime we’d stopped noticing.
Car parks flickered awake.
Nurses spilled from buses,
their chatty breath rising in ghostly flurries.

You pushed circles into my spine,
slow orbits to keep me tethered
as the contractions rolled in,
wave after wave,
while I rested on the peeling windowsill
and wondered why no one else
cared about our miracle.

The solstice sun didn’t care
as it heaved itself upward
into a cathedral of fog.
Its light arrived late, left early,
offered no warmth.
Yet somewhere between those shrinking hours
he fell into the world,
a small, furious lantern
protesting the cold.

How could the shortest day
hold so much expansion?
Brittle moments cracking under the weight
of something vast and new.
This strange flare of life
we suddenly belonged to.

Jenni Thorne is a Black Country poet who enjoys writing about her exploration of memory, resilience, and the quiet strangeness of everyday life. She shares her work on Bluesky at @jenthorne.bsky.social