Janus, the both-ways looking god by Sandra Horn

January, named for Janus the two-faced god: the traditional time to look back and look forward. For me, he can close his eyes on 2023, which wasn’t the best year by a long chalk. We had bereavements of a particularly painful kind – the sudden and unexpected deaths of very dear friends we had shared most of our lives with, who died within days of each other. Then there were various ‘bits dropping off’ – old age galloping on apace! 

Sonnet: Old Age

I saw you from a distance in those days

The days of carefree, self-regarding youth

The days when ‘how I want it’ stood for truth

Your world unfocussed in my shortened gaze

 

What were false teeth, what walking sticks, grey hair?

What was a ‘span’ of three-score years and ten?

Beyond a fleeting frisson now and then

Your presence was ignored: not my affair.

 

But since I have long passed the given span

My vision is corrected, no short sight

Can help me to avoid your company

You’re here now. First you crawled and then you ran

Swift as a well-fletched arrow in its flight

 I’m caught and you will have your way with me

It was all too easy to get gloomy about it all. There was a bright spot in the midst of it all, though – the poet Jo Bell set up The Poetic Licence, a community of poets and would-be poets, and my inbox was enlivened by frequent prompts, ideas, interviews, videos, links…so much to look forward to, and to challenge and provoke. It was ‘wake up and shake up’ for me. One of the group, Bean Sawyer, is also a skilled artisan and among other things she produced 2024 diaries with cyanotype prints on the covers. Mine says Begin Again and that’s what I see every day.

 …and In 11 more days it will be Imbolc, the first fire festival of the year: the return on light

 Imbolc

Into the darkness,

Bright flames leap

Light calls to light

Earth calls to Sun

 

It's freezing cold as I write, but the first few daffodils are out in the garden, the first snowdrops too, and the hellebores flattened by the frost will pick themselves up again as they always do. 

  

 Persephone is coming back from the underworld and the Earth Mother rejoices. Spring comes creeping in: 

Spring

The ferry cleaves the mist.

She steps ashore, uncertain of her footing.

Hands raised to shield her dark-adapted eyes.

She’s taller, surely. Pallid. Etiolated.

Now she must learn this world, her other world, again.

Let it be gentle, gradual, give her time;

mild rains, mild airs, slow dawns,

long dusks, the measured increment of days.

Banish with song the silent realm of ghosts –

come, blackbird, woodlark, mistle thrush.

Let unfolding leaf-bud, snowdrop, primrose,

summon her sweetly to light and life.