What cold is (January 22)

~ Describe Cold ~

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Brrr, it's cold up here in Philadelphia, PA. Combine cold with dark, and I want to eat a lot and hibernate.  Even the furriest animal must prepare to hibernate and to survive in the cold of winter. Some bury themselves in blankets, leaves, or caves until the daylight grows warmer.  Some come more alive in the cold.  And so I wonder: 

What do you do to get by in the coldest months of the year?  Do you take part in winter activities?  And how can we prepare for being "left out in the cold" or being "treated coldly"?  What does having a tall glass of iced tea or an ice cream cone feel like on a hot hot day?  

Our prompt: describe cold in a poem, any kind of cold 

A few thoughts:

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          Knoxville, Tennessee

By Nikki Giovanni

I always like summer

best

you can eat fresh corn

from daddy's garden

and okra

and greens

and cabbage

and lots of

barbecue

and buttermilk

and homemade ice-cream

at the church picnic

and listen to

gospel music

outside

at the church

homecoming

and you go to the mountains with

your grandmother

and go barefooted

and be warm

all the time

not only when you go to bed

and sleep

COLD POEM 

by Mary Oliver

Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.

I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handsful of grain.

Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe

that is what it means, the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.

In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.

From American Primitive
Little, Brown, 1983

               

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❤❤❤

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