The pattern breaks

The Christmas lunch. Always sunlight through
The glass, illuminating faces seen
Or summoned from a memory: for an hour
You sit with friends and family outside time,
A fragile place where all is bright and those
Who are no longer here return. The flame
That dances on the pudding snaps the spell.
The Christmas walk. Murmured déjà vu
Is round the corner heard, along the trail
You tread exactly once a year: those steps
Beneath the vault of wind-raked beech, and past
The trembling copper coins that cling to beams
Of deeper shade, as if resisting gales
That stress the footings of the span beyond.
The pause. At the gate you turn, and know
The rooksquall woods in gold, upon the hill
Above, a yearly photo: never does
It change to sight, but brittle grows, as harsh
This smartphone camera sees and strips the limbs
More surely than the winter winds. The dark
Is looted by the cloud. And on you walk.
A carol drifting on the night. Bells
From church confuse the tune, which swells displaced
And casts an aura in your mind: is this
The haunting song you heard once as a child,
The one that made you cry with images
You could not even name? The pattern breaks,
So sing along until the final note.
You do not pace the same old path. You are
The path, the storm, the trees, the scattered leaves,
The fleeting view that must be photographed,
The sunlit table and the carol sung.
So step beyond the limits of your years.
Your life is very short and very long,
Both at once.

I composed these verses over the Christmas week. They’re more or less in blank verse – that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter – because I’m halfway through Milton’s Paradise Lost at the moment and this meter is hammering like a drumbeat in my head. Always when writing poetry before I have worked in free verse or haiku, but I thought I’d give something more structured a try. The variant feet are deliberate. Hoping this should be obvious enough. ‘Rooksquall’ is one of my little made-up portmanteau words; I’ve plundered it from a 2020 haiku.

Like all my personal writing, it started life as a mess of scrawls on paper – and initially as very free verse before imposing iambic pentameter. I found this creative constraint to be a terrific way of clarifying the images and figuring out what was essential: one of the most engaging writing exercises I can think of. As always, the process of creation is more important than the end result.

What’s the poem about? I’ll leave that to your interpretation. It isn’t necessarily descriptive of my own Christmas experience, which is why I wrote it in second person and not first, but I think the ideas it evokes are relatable (if not quite universal).

I hope you all had a restful Christmas. I’m looking forward to resuming my usual writing in 2026. If you’d like to see more poetry on these pages, please do let me know.

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Images and words © Alex Roddie. No AI has been used in the creation of any work on this page. All Rights Reserved. Please don’t reproduce this material without permission.