In a half-sleep, I hear my daughter talking in the kitchen. Another odd parallel to pregnancy – sudden sleep, confused awakenings. Where am I?

She brings me a slender book, Pax by Annie Lighthart, gift from a friend. I rally up, read the book that afternoon as the wind lifts the Christmas lights around our house and barn and gently tap, taps, the clapboards. Solstice, winter’s toothy cold burrows in. My daughter’s whole life I’ve been the hearth keeper, the ash sweeper. The rotator of ash buckets, kindling boxes, the wakeful night-keeper layering the firebox with wood. Now, suddenly, her duty. She’s fed the fire for years, of course, but the ash shovel has been handed over. Fact, fact.

The solstice crossed, we enter winter’s long terrain. The neighbors’ dogs howl. Somewhere in the night, I lie awake, a single star a distant light in my window, pure as a teardrop.

LANTERN

Some evening, almost accidentally, you might yet understand
that you belong, are meant to be, are sheltered—

still foolish, but looking out the door with a contented heart.
This is what the king wants and the old man and woman

and even the busy young if you knew, and you have it
by no grace of your own, standing in the doorway

with loose empty hands. Now your heart lights your mind,
a little lantern bobbing within you,

giving out not thought or feeling but confluence,
something else. On what do you pour out this light?

The wet street is empty, one wren in the yard. Let us
redefine love and wreckage, time and weeds.

Pour out your lantern light on the grass, on the bird,
great and small worlds. Don’t go inside for a long, long time.

– Annie Lighthart –