Advent

poem

Iris Shaw, November 2025

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Backwater dreams, under the ice

Earth swallows silence, biding

The long white hours

Of eternity in December:

Apples hang rotting

Under snow, from blackened trees,

The haunt of crows

On dark blue afternoons –

And I have waited

Here, still

To wait, arrive, and ask again

For grace, remembering

While the world draws in

Before the cold

Snow like rain, streetlights half-obscured,

Picking out in gold

Against the dark

The icon of a mother and her child.

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