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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
6:42 AM 6th January 2025
arts

Poem Of The Week: Winter Morning By Richard Meier

Winter Morning

Shyly coated in greys, blacks, browns -
to keep us out of sight of the cold -
we weren't expecting this this morning: sun

and shadows, like a summer's evening, like summer
teasing. And not quite under the shelter on
the northbound platform, an old man, the sun

behind him, just his crown ablaze; and heading
southbound, a woman inching ever nearer
the platform edge, the light a tear

across her midriff, ribcage, shoulders, closer
and closer that dearest thing, completeness,
all her darkness light at the one time.


The unexpected cast of shadows yielding the illusion of summer on a winter’s day, in Richard Meier’s artful and subtly rendered poem, is somehow premonitory; and if it isn’t a premonition, it is atmospherically mirrored by the woman on the southbound platform, whose interior darkness is illuminated in precise counterpoint.

The ice-cold edging of the sun’s rays, whose effect is delivered in the slow melt of a sibilant ache, and whose figurative blaze ‘anoints’ the head of the old man, is ironised by the presence of the woman as she ‘inches ever nearer / the platform edge’. Her motives and subsequent actions are left to suggestion as the narrator’s lambent vision detaches object from subject, and invests her body, as slowly as the rising sun, with another kind of light.


‘Winter Morning’ is taken from Misadventure, published by Picador (2012)


More information here.