"Winter Reflections" by Clare Bryden
18 March 2024
"Having survived through what seems like an impossibly wet and windy winter, I was delighted to spend the whole of today in the garden, getting it ready for planting and clearing away some of the debris that’s accumulated. Like many folk in Kilchrenan, we have a spectacular view of Cruachan and it’s great to have it reappear on our horizon instead of being shrouded in cloud or immersed in darkness. It’s wonderful to feel that the movement towards spring is underway.
One of the things I love to do no matter what the time of year is to write, often poetry. I’d like to share a few poems that have been influenced by living here -and where better to start than with the seasons that I feel so connected to when they’re right there outside our window in all their glory."
As we’re moving into warmth, here’s a poem which looks back and celebrates the cold:
Snowflake
Caught in the crosshairs of my woollen glove,
You are the arrival and the ending of a possibility.
A white speck of vastness,
with your complex community of ice
you are individual in your intricacy.
Resting your great responsibility –
just for a second –
you are satisfied at last that you have become
who you truly are.
Each sparkle is a firework,
your moment is the perfection of your dance.
And, in your melting,
worlds are destroyed.
Another thing I love to do, no matter what the time of year, is swim. I often swim from Kelly’s Pier in Taynuilt, but can equally be found in Loch Awe – always a challenge in the winter but always worth it. Here is a poem written after a trip to the Falls Of Avich and a refreshing dip under the force of the water. It reflects why I love swimming so much – no matter how much the weight of the world is weighing on me, an icy dip clears my head and resets my sense of self.
Waterfall
I trip heavily:
An outing with a mind stuck too much to itself,
The skelfs of the world
Birling and hurling me down.
But on this day stopping, before I drown,
Sending sprays of showers –
Waterous, swirling and noisome -
Around me.
The weight on my shoulders is not my own,
It is the weight of the sky, the rain, the dirt and the hills,
Tumbling downwards it never stills
But pulls me outwards from myself
And into liquid form:
Currents pulling, cajoling, rolling,
Til, caught on rocks, I stay balanced.
My tipping point calm as life flows around me.
It is everything to me here.
All of it is clear:
The chatter, the joy, the drop, the deep,
The darkness, the flow, the strength, and the seeping
Sensation that holds me in place,
The force supporting, not drowning,
But drawing me into and out of myself.
I am caught in a slow-moving moment of place,
Lying here alive and at peace.
And finally, another thing I love is to cycle. I often head up the windfarm road and head along the forestry tracks and usually it’s just me and the wild. It struck me one Sunday morning how I would get home and say that ‘No one was out,’ yet my whole bike ride was full of the life around me.
No one is out
It’s a Sunday at the end of October.
It is morning.
I am on my bike with its new chain.
Up the windfarm road, along the forestry tracks,
Past the newly harvested trees,
Whose discarded skeletons foreground the mountain
And reveal the startling new shapes of the landscape’s skull.
There is rain.
A smirr, like tiny insects balancing on my fleece,
Fuzzing the orange striped hills, muting the day.
There is wind.
Cycling into a cushion full of edges,
That moulds itself to my effort:
Pin pricks of sharpness on exposed skin.
There are 5 swans.
I round the bend, down the hill and subitize them on the loch,
A family, startled by my flight into their own,
Become a number line of necks and wings.
There is the track.
The heaped mud softly pierced by brown and greying stones,
The penitential bowing heads of trackside grasses
And the clumping brightness of a glimpse of white.
It is a Sunday at the end of October.
A morning bike ride in the wind and rain.
No one is out.
This is just a sample of the poems I’ve written. I write on a wide range of subjects – the world around me, politics, feminism and the people I am delighted to share my life with to name but a few, and you can find me reading my work at Oban’s Let’s Make A Scene open mic nights, or online at Clare's Poems or on Facebook at @ClarePoetry. My online presence is very much a work in progress but I will try to spend more time updating with work as I write all the time- and I’m looking forward to celebrating the spring and summer as they arrive.
