As a child perhaps you, like me, made snow angels: Lying on our backs, scooping snow away with arms and legs to leave the scalloped shapes. The trick was to get up, still within the angel's shape, then jump as far as you could to get away from it without leaving tracks. But then you realized you'd left tracks to the spot where you lay down in the cold white blanket. You marked the inviting whiteness the minute you entered it.
Several of the poems about December describe the tracks left by animals in snowfall, each poet choosing their own way in. Others describe the gritty gray of an urban setting or the unseasonable warmth of a California winter for someone raised in Vermont.
For this collection I resisted the easy choices: poems about Christmas or New Year's Eve. The winter solstice, as an astronomical fact independent of human calendars or belief systems, is worth its own consideration, as my 2022 winter solstice and 2023 winter solstice posts attest.
If these leave you cold and shivering you can always hop over to my collection of poems about soup for a warm-up.
"Winter Afternoon, Early December" by Tom Montag
The grey lid has been
lifted off the day.
Sun spills everywhere—
on snow, on house, on
me at the window.
"A December Day" by Sara Teasdale
Dawn turned on her purple pillow,
And late, late came the winter day;
Snow was curved to the boughs of the willow,
The sunless world was white and grey.
"December Thaw" by Milton Burgh
For three days the warm sun has been pulling
The silver wedges from the ground,
Until now it is soft and free.
"December" by Sarah Freligh
On the fire escape, one
stupid petunia still blooms,
"Chicago and December" by W.S. Di Piero
Vague fatigued promise hangs
in the low darkened sky
when bunched scrawny starlings
rattle up from trees,
switchback and snag
like tossed rags dressing
the bare wintering branches,
black-on-black shining,
"December in Los Angeles" by Timothy Steele
The tulip bulbs rest darkly in the fridge
To get the winter they can't get outside;
The drought and warm winds alter and abridge
The season till it almost seems denied.
"December" by Christopher Cranch
Like agate stones upon earth’s frozen breast,
The little pools of ice lie round and still;
While sullen clouds shut downward east and west
In marble ridges stretched from hill to hill.
"Deciphering the Alphabet" by Francine Sterle
Winter advances
leaving its white tracks
bounding over the hills
I climb each December
to get to the river
where velvety shrews,
voles and squirrels
crisscross in the snow,
"December Moon" by May Sarton
How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we'll never know
Sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.
"December Notes" by Nancy McCleery
The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks
The songs we hear. Delicate
Sparrow, heavier cardinal,
A Year of Poems
- A Year of Poems: January
- A Year of Poems: February
- A Year of Poems: March
- A Year of Poems: April
- A Year of Poems: May
- A Year of Poems: June
- A Year of Poems: July
- A Year of Poems: August
- A Year of Poems: September
- A Year of Poems: October
- A Year of Poems: November
