In our corner of southeast England, we were treated last week to a spectacular display of nacreous clouds. I had occasionally observed nacreous clouds during the years I lived in Aberdeen in Scotland, but this was the first time I’ve seen them so far south. Their iridescence provided a glow of joy in what has been a bleak time.

Nacreous clouds above Kent, December 2023. Photo credit: Marian Christie

Clouds often feature in my poetry. My first poem, composed when I was five, was about sunrise and clouds.

Quietly dawns the day
golden sun arising
copper clouds are scattered
over the horizon.

Dawn clouds. Photo credit: Marian Christie

The night skies of my childhood were full of wonders: the Milky Way, like a vast river of lights against the darkness; the moon, home to Kalulu the African hare; the glittering Southern Cross; fireflies flickering among the reeds by the dam at the bottom of the hill where we lived; comet Ikeya-Seki, its long, shimmering tail spangled with stars. 

All these images have found their way into poems of mine over the years. Ikeya-Seki was the inspiration for ‘Sungrazer’ (Consilience Journal #5); Kalulu, disguised as a rabbit, sneaks into my ekphrastic poem ‘Tessellations’ (Ekphrastic Review 2020); and here’s ‘Windflowers’, a lament for the loss of dark skies, which was originally published in Pushing out the Boat #16.

Windflowers

December – too late, but I plant them anyway
among soggy maple leaves and acrid signature of fox. 
The sky sulks over rooftops, roads, streetlamps, 
filaments of trees. Soil clings to my trowel 
like a guilty lover, exposing shameful secrets – 
rootlets of departed shrubs, fragmented light bulbs 
trailing tungsten tendrils, half-bricks clutched 
in concrete fists. The slow slide of a worm, its body 
filling space the way we fill silence with words. 
The way I fill holes with bulbs dark as cindered 
meteorites, only their lace of fibre to suggest 
spring’s many-petalled sprinkle of lilac and blue 
and white. Stars will bloom on earth
as the stars vanish softly from our skies.

I love gardens but, unlike my green-fingered sisters, I am, alas, a haphazard gardener at best. Nevertheless I seem to spend a lot of time planting spring bulbs in my poems, perhaps yearning subliminally for light and colour.

Keukenhof, The Netherlands. Photo credit: Marian Christie

Other gardening activities such as weeding or planting also provide good inspiration for poetry, as in ‘Entanglement’ (Dust Poetry #7) and ‘Weeds are plants in the wrong place’ (which appeared in The Fib Review #46).

So what can you expect from me in 2024? Sky poems. Earth poems. Poems in which sky and earth converse with each other. And perhaps some musing on other things as well.

Meanwhile, here is an arrangement of flowers picked from my garden on 22nd December, the winter solstice. There is so much beauty in our world, even on the darkest of days.

Floral arrangement, winter 2023. Photo credit: Marian Christie