The Solstice Turn

Happiness starts coming back with winter chill.
The cold raises the hairs on the back of our necks
the way honesty does. The sky opens its arms to clouds
and the setting sun paints them gradually into shadow.

We hold back from turning on the heating,
open the windows wide. The breezes that pull
leaves from the trees, yank out the sleepy simmer
of summer thoughts. The deep dark is calling

like memories stored for later use. We wrap
a shawl around our shoulders, bring close again
the wool, the months of toil. We are ready for the moors
and their mist wisdom. Everything has led to this.

Hannah Linden, neurodivergent, queer, working class, won Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, was Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021 & 2nd in the Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. Bluesky @hannahl1n

Longyearbyen

It’s nothing to do with the months of endless night
(and a day the same) but a grisly Michigan prospector
who mined seams of coal from land that’s two-thirds ice.
What’s left conspires to conceal the bear and seal
with fox-stealth from each other, calves from glaciers
that crash into a vasty sea and enervate the soul,
mammoth sculptures rafting ‘bergy-bits’ and ‘growlers’
launch into opposing packs, groan like prop forwards.
Nothing is what it seems, and no one minds. Its words,
unmoored, are rambling, cast-off misremembered lines.
Here ‘Youth’ is grey and ‘fast’ like tarmac;
ice is what ice is, it has no side
to it; is rotten, pure again,
first dark, then out of sight.

John White has been commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Eco poetry (2020) and the Magma Poetry Prize (2024). Attachments (Templar), won the 2023 iOTA Shot pamphlets competition, and was published in June 2024. He takes wing occasionally at @johncraigwhite.bsky.social

Note: ‘Longyear’s town’, the world’s northernmost settlement, is named after John Munro Longyear, whose Arctic Coal Company began mining in Svalbard from 1906.

Christmas Lights
Ullapool, 2017

They’re putting up the lights strung out on poles
along the harbour wall, the dark young lads
in oily overalls, and there’s a tree
built out of creels out at The Point, as though
a pagan pendant on a flimsy string
of beads, defiant, and alluring as
the Sirens’ phantom lighthouse.
And upstairs
in dim bedrooms the girls undress and dress;
the boys smirk at the mirror mouthing chat-
up lines from movies.
Now the villages is
en fête: dressed for a party in the dark,
across the fields, along uneven paths,
a low-roofed barn with steamed-up windows and
a fiddler and her band. And Christmas lights.

Stephen Keeler is an award-winning writer, memoirist and poet whose work is widely published in journals, magazines, online and in anthologies.  His slim collection They Spoke No English is published by Nine Pens Press. Scar Tissue, his small autobiographical collection,won a Coast to Coast to Coast award in 2021

Note: First published by Candlestick Press, in ‘Christmas Lights’, 2018.