Little Winter Elegies
Dear poets:
After you have died,
where is the winter field?
There is no more sorrow here.
Like a wild garden it unwinds
under my gravestone feet
while we wait for the ground to melt.
Tell me the way?
O chanting,
is there a path:
a fire in the snow warms us,
over its black and charred circle;
a gentle persuasion redeems us
as we hold steaming mugs of apple cider . . .
What is my consolation in a winter field,
where each snowflake is a brush with time?
An intricate melding with eternity:
the sparkle of crystal and aspen-white flowers
deeper than the trunks ordering space,
meticulous as it is disordered.
The future marching on note by note
to the thunder of white horses,
their hoofs graft the wild garden
of a field on a solstice noon.
Dear poets:
singing on
where I have seen
the frost harden;
what I have seen your hands collect,
winter brush for a fire,
winter flowers, dried solace,
a foundation of ancient mahogany in silence,
a layering of warmth and wool and yarn,
calm and frosted against the coming night,
scratching at the panes
beside the stone fireplace and new fire.
O gentle earth,
will you rise in winter
and meet with the poets each day—
will you clap your hands
at the silvery dawn,
as simply as I clapped
this morning into being?
Dear Poets,
with truth,
I have
met at your icy
alabaster hands,
new times
after forgotten time,
in which you continue on
and life gives birth to life ...
Your old hands pour new oil balm,
a seed into snow,
gnarled, branched reaching out,
until a new tree spans heavenward.
In the eye of the January tide,
and through the crust of field, and snowy broom,
where silent
teardrops reside,
and shifting papers yield;
here there is a portal to the heart,
an open vessel beats like drum,
and there in the shadows of the dark,
steeped in moonlight,
the hidden ones run.
My earth,
I co-create for
your future.
Everything I gave you,
every season, pencilled in,
bathed you in beauty:
the wonder of being alive.
The morning comes
like a dream
to the one in this night,
where moonlight is a sonnet,
and dying only a poem,
the curse cast away
like your white bones
lie hidden beneath the surface.
There is no more sorrow here.
Emily Isaacson
January video of poetry
Poetry Analysis:
“Little Winter Elegies” by Isaacson is a winter film-poem that meditates on death not as disappearance, but as concealment. Set in a snowbound field of white horses, frost-crowned women, and slow drifting light, the poem asks where we go after death—and answers not with doctrine, but with images of waiting, warmth, and quiet continuity. Winter here is not an ending, but a held breath: a field resting beneath its future.
Throughout the poem, Isaacson returns to the language of hands, fire, seeds, and soil—ordinary gestures elevated into sacramental acts. The winter field becomes a wild garden, where time is brushed gently by snowflakes and the divine future advances “note by note.” White horses move like history itself, grafting promise into frozen ground, while human figures remain still, receptive, and luminous, clothed in patience rather than urgency.
The film’s imagery
draws on the lexicon woven into the poem: fire in snow as consolation, oil as
healing, seeds buried in cold as faith in resurrection. Even death is rendered
without violence— “like your white bones /lie hidden beneath the surface.”—suggesting
not erasure, but transformation. The recurring address to “Dear poets” frames
the work as an inheritance, a conversation across generations, where life gives
birth to life through attention, craft, and care.
In “Leather-bound Little Elegies”, sorrow is not denied but fulfilled. The closing affirmation—There is no more sorrow here—arrives not as escape, but as rest. This film and poem resound as an invitation to the land of Avalon, a symbolic landscape where theology, myth, and winter meet: a place where the hidden ones still run, moonlit and alive, and where dying is understood as only another poem in the long making of beauty.
A Winter Lexicon
(Symbol
& Theological Resonance)
Winter Field
Symbolism: The space beyond death; the
threshold between time and eternity.
Theological Resonance: Winter is not absence but waiting—death as
dormancy, not erasure. The field remains, held in promise.
Wild Garden
Symbolism: Creation ungoverned by human
order, alive beneath the frost.
Theological Resonance: God’s future is organic, not mechanical.
Redemption grows where control loosens.
Fire in the Snow
Symbolism: Consolation, communion, and
warmth amid desolation.
Theological Resonance: Grace does not cancel suffering; it inhabits it.
The sacred is present even in cold seasons.
Snowflake
Symbolism: A single, unrepeatable moment of
time.
Theological Resonance: Eternity touches the world in particulars. Time
is not lost but gathered.
White Horses
Symbolism: Force, movement, and procession
toward what is to come.
Theological Resonance: History is not static; the divine future advances
with power and purpose.
Solstice
Symbolism: The turning point at the deepest
dark.
Theological Resonance: God works through reversal. Light is born
precisely where night is longest.
Hands
Symbolism: Craft, labour, blessing, and
transmission.
Theological Resonance: Creation and salvation are relational acts—life
handed on through touch and care.
Oil Balm
Symbolism: Healing, anointing, and
preparation.
Theological Resonance: Renewal comes through consecration. What is
wounded is also chosen.
Seed in Snow
Symbolism: Hidden life placed into apparent
death.
Theological Resonance: Resurrection logic—life entrusted to burial in
faith.
Portal
Symbolism: An opening between worlds, inner
and outer.
Theological Resonance: The heart is not sealed; God leaves passages where
we expect walls.
Open Vessel
Symbolism: Vulnerability, receptivity, and
readiness.
Theological Resonance: Grace requires openness. Fullness begins in
emptiness.
The Hidden Ones
Symbolism: Lives concealed from sight yet
alive in motion.
Theological Resonance: The redeemed are not lost but kept. God’s kingdom
moves quietly, often unseen.
Moonlight
Symbolism: Reflected light, gentler than
the sun.
Theological Resonance: We know God indirectly, by grace and reflection,
not by mastery.
White Bones
Symbolism: Mortality laid bare, history
beneath the soil.
Theological Resonance: Death is acknowledged but not final. What lies
hidden awaits transfiguration.
No More Sorrow
Symbolism: The final rest of grief.
Theological Resonance: Not denial, but fulfilment—lament answered by
restoration.
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