It's raining when it should be snowing

Posted Christmas eve, Thursday night, December 24, 2020.

Traditional Christmas card with holly and mistletoe, circa 1880, via Wikipedia.

From the Department of Serendipitous Reading: Relentless, remorseless streaming and pooling of drowning rain and winds more like gales blowing across Midwestern prairies scouring the back deck are not sounds you like hearing in the dead of any night, let alone Christmas eve. Seamus Heaney provides the words for the weather report from here, meteorological and metaphysical---it's raining when it should be snowing, I'm reaching for books like a doubter, but even Heaney's own black letters are as cutting as holly and ice...

It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly

the ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags

and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

and I almost forgot what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,

a black letter bush, a glittering shield-wall,
cutting as holly and ice.

---”Holly”, from "Station Island" by Seamus Heaney..