This month’s poem, Winter’s Orbit, imagines how it would feel to undertake a winter migration in a time before way markers, roads or cities. Poet Tina Baker takes the reader back to prehistoric humankind, struggling across a dark and featureless landscape.
She said: ‘They were the first to make tracks, some possibly still in use today, but how did they decide which way to go when the stars were hidden by cloud, or the river forked, or the land was covered by snow and the view ahead a blizzard? What did they do when the sky fell to earth when the way forward looked the same as the way back?
‘The aim was to create a claustrophobic mood, the feeling caused by short, grey winter days which seem to stretch into infinity, the days you feel like walking until the clouds are left behind until you find the sun again.’
Tina was inspired to write more poetry after joining Cirencester-based poetry group Wordbrew. She said: ‘I find I’ve been challenged and encouraged by the excellent poets in the group.’
To read Winter’s Orbit go to cirenscene.com.
To read other work by Cirencester Writers, go to somewhere-else-writers.org.
Winter’s Orbit
When winter came they left,
drawn by some horizon on an invisible path,
their deep prints cupping the shadows of the moon,
leaving cavernous messages,
a tracker’s dream.
Above, the stars slow wheeled as land and sky fused,
up was down and down was up,
and the territory curled around
trapping them in winter’s orbit.
Inside infinity they lost their ways
but fear of eternity drove them on
to prise the sky from the land,
to force another dawn.
Tina Baker
Winter’s Orbit was first published in ‘Off the Wall’ an anthology of stories and poems by Somewhere Else Writers available on Amazon.
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