Winter Solstice in Provence

Rain wavelets overlap in drafts

Down a mountain bowl of air,

Sweeping sage smokes and juniper,

Washing walnut roots and lavender,

Burrowing into chalk bones of the land.

Clay fields filter the rain into flowers of oil,

Or kiss faint crumbling soils into saps of wine.

Each arched cellar births a bleating life into

Darkness hung with cobwebbed straw,

Or shelters bursting bins of vegetable wealth

Culled from last summer's wet ochre soil,

Their roots underground now reaching up  

Pale fingers of sprout to only imagined light.

The sky weeps down to how we rose rejoicing

While in warmth we sleep to its brushed caress

Across chill darkened windowpanes.

Words that mumble out our sleeping lips

Are heard in worlds forever kissing ours.

Their messages evaporate incessantly up to

Each new curtained breath of rain-born wind,

Shrouding out a year still huddling round  

Its longest dusk of tended embers glows,

Cradling slowly sipped rememberings,

Storing up sleep to feed the coming year.

©Erik Bendix

oil painting by Jane Bendix