Winter!

Free for use under the Pixabay Content license. Image credit: Mollyroselee

What is your favorite type of weather?

I don’t care that I’m in the minority. Give me chilly winds and icy skies. Give me naked trees reaching their gnarled limbs in every direction. Give me the nostalgia of snow days and canceled classes, empty hours with nothing of import to fill them with. Those were simpler times. Maybe it’s because I associate winter with my childhood, and staying home and watching movies with my mom without the encumbrance of a “non-traditional instruction day” (really, tell me something technology hasn’t destroyed).

Summer is not my jam anyway. Too hot, especially in the South. Good God, you can’t take your clothes off fast enough in air so hot and sticky just breathing is an insurmountable chore. I mean, it has its perks, especially when you’re a kid. Summer vacation, no school, you know the drill. Swimming and traveling and running in the grass under the hot sun until your pants and shirt are stained with chlorophyll and your skin is pink with sunburn (or in my delicate case, sun poisoning).

Free for use under the Pixabay Content license. Image credit: DominikRh

Swimming and traveling and running in the grass under the hot sun until your pants and shirt are stained with chlorophyll and your skin is pink with sunburn (or in my delicate case, sun poisoning).

Added is the fact that summer is bittersweet because you know it will never last. The days will grow shorter and colder. The leaves will turn and you’ll return to school and the hustle and bustle of life. Winter Is Coming, indeed.

But in winter, there is always hope. Hope that you can’t find in summer, which is this…spring is on its way.

Free for use under the Pixabay Content license. Image credit: jplenio

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Quote for the Day: February 23rd, 2022

There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in the difference every year.
Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

Poem for the Day: October 17th, 2021

Signs by Larry Levis

All night I dreamed of my home,
of the roads that are so long
and straight they die in the middle—
among the spines of elderly weeds
on either side, among the dead cats,
the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase
thrown open, sprouting failures.

   2.
And this evening in the garden
I find the winter
inside a snail shell, rigid and
cool, a little stubborn temple,
its one visitor gone.

   3.
If there were messages or signs,
I might hear now a voice tell me
to walk forever, to ask
the mold for pardon, and one
by one I would hear out my sins,
hear they are not important—that I am
part of this rain
drumming its long fingers, and
of the roadside stone refusing
to blink, and of the coyote
nailed to the fence with its
long grin.

And when there are no messages
the dead lie still—
their hands crossed so strangely
like knives and forks after supper.

   4.
I stay up late listening.
My feet tap the floor,
they begin a tiny dance
which will outlive me.
They turn away from this poem.
It is almost Spring.

The Selected Levis is available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Poem for the Day: August 23rd, 2021

To The Young Who Want to Die by Gwendolyn Brooks

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. 
The gun will wait. The lake will wait. 
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April. 
You do not have to die this certain day. 
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. 
I assure you death will wait. Death has 
a lot of time. Death can 
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is 
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; 
can meet you any moment. 

You need not die today. 
Stay here—through pout or pain or peskyness. 
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. 

Graves grow no green that you can use. 
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

I have a deep and abiding love for Gwendolyn Brooks and her poetry. So much of her work reads like prayer, and nowhere is this more evident than in the line You need not die today. Sometimes, I feel like life kicks us so squarely in the face that it would be easier to lie down and die. And it would be. Death is patient and eager to those who would embrace its precepts. But life…life has so much to offer us. And so we go back to Brooks: You need not die today. You need not die today. You need not die today. You need not die today. You need not die today. You need not die today. You need not die today.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.