Sue Snyder selected the following three poems that were read during the 2020 Winter Solstice Celebration.
A Winter Bluejay (excerpt) by Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale was born in 1884 and died in 1933. She was in poor health most of her childhood and suffered from depression. In her poem A Winter Bluejay, she imagines the joy, the freedom, and the ecstasy of being a bird.
“Oh look!”
There, on the black bough of a snow flecked maple
Fearless and gay as our love,
A bluejay cocked his crest!
Oh who can tell the range of joy
Or set the bounds of beauty?
Link to ‘A Winter Bluejay’ (complete poem)
At the Solstice (excerpt) by Shaun O’Brien
Shaun O’Brien, a native of London, is a professor of creative writing at Newcastle University. He has won several awards for his poetry, including the T.S. Eliot and Forward prizes. As a member of the Royal Society of Literature, he writes poetry, essays, short stories, novels, and is a playwright . . . and a tough critic.
We say Next time we’ll go away,
But then the winter happens, like a secret
We’ve to keep yet never understand
As daylight turns to cinema once more:
A lustrous darkness deep in ice-age cold,
Link to ‘At the Solstice’ (complete poem)
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (excerpt) by Robert Frost
Robert Frost wrote this poem in June of 1922 at home in Vermont. He’d been awake all night working on another poem (New Hampshire) when he walked outside to see the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. This poem came to him as if a hallucination in just a few minutes.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Link to ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ (complete poem)
Order of the Sacred Earth OC 
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