Poem of the Week: Grianstad, East Coast Solstice

You, arisen, crawl from Cardigan Bay
across to us, your limbs slow, deep

into every estuary and lough, Slaney,
Broad Lough, Dublin, Baldoyle, Drogheda,

Carlingford, Strangford, Port of Belfast,
Larne, Carnlough, Cushendall, Cushendun.

Night-chilled protean entering our shore,
probing silent waters, you catch the keen eyes

of dawn walkers in coats and hats, push
through their breath-billow, limning

their bodies, sealing tide, shore,
sand, in a sacred skin of light. For this

we wait, for you—winter small sun, your
thinner gift, a slow push above the horizon

to offer some pause on this one day
to our unconscious grief, to clear its shadow

here where we hover, close to the earth.
Quiet now, no need to rush forward,

to bend our bodies to common labours.
Instead, such moments when we accept

your limbs against our skin,
dance slowly in the cold dawn, feel

the winter gods release through us
for this solitary day.

Mary O’Donnell's novel Sweep the Cobwebs off the Sky will be published by Époque Press next March, and her poetry collection Tenderness appears with Wake Forest University Press in September