The Light That Returns Without Being Asked – Richard Tyler

This poem was written to celebrate the Spring Equionox on #WorldPoetryDay 

Before the word spring existed, this happened; the tipping, the slow lean of the world back toward the fire.

The light arrives now at a different angle.

Not the low imploring of winter, that long begging slant,

but something more level, more direct.

The sun looks the earth in the eye.

This is the hinge.

Stand in it. You are not witnessing a beginning.

Beginnings are a story we tell because we fear the circle.

What you are standing in is continuation.

The hawthorn does not decide to bud.

The curlew does not choose its northward pull.

These are not choices.

They are rememberings.

The body of the world

recalling what it knew

before the cold came

and made it doubt.

In the oldest calendars there was no word that meant new year. Only a word that meant the return of the same light.

The blackthorn knows.

The soil, still carrying the bruise of frost, knows.

You are also an animal who has been waiting.

The tightness across your chest these past months has a name, and the name is winter, and it is ending.

Let it end.

The equinox does not ask for ceremony.

But if you must make one, stand where the horizon is wide,

face the place where the sun will set,

wait,

watch the light go level

and then go gold

and then go.

Feel the exact equality of it:

day and night

the same weight on the scales,

just for today,

before the light begins to win.

Then go inside. Eat something warm. This too is ritual. The ordinary sacred act of sitting down together, of saying: we made it through.

Something is returning that was never truly gone.

This is the oldest magic.

It doesn’t announce itself. It simply arrives,

as light does,

as warmth does,

as you do,

after every winter of your life.

Quietly…

and on time.