Firestone Feinberg VERSE-VIRTUAL 2017 December

December 2017

In 1968 I was seventeen and it was my first year in college. There, on the first day, I met Susan. By December I was in love with her (but didn't quite know it yet). (Now we've been married for 45 years.) Anyhow, we were in Woodstock NY and we went to a small jewelry shop where we saw a silver charm -- a pendant -- which she loved. We asked the jewelry-maker what the symbol was, and he told us it was a symbol of winter (whence I don't know). It was almost Christmas break and she had to go home. While she was away I went back to Woodstock and bought the charm. I gave it to her when she came back from Christmas break. I wrote this poem -- one of my first -- and put it in the gift box with the charm. She was delighted. She still has the poem (which I typed on my father's old manual Remington-Rand) and the charm in her jewelry box.

Winter
-for Susan-

The shadows of spring are colored with birth
Of children, of flowers, of life and new love
With dancing and singing I return to the earth
For this is a season of joy

The sun of the summer rises with life
And it sets on the sleeping, the dreaming, in peace
The stars, flaming diamonds, appear in the night
To me in a season of kings

The mountains of autumn arise to their fate
With red and with yellow, with orange and gold
And the souls of the old can no longer wait
For this is the season of death

And I am in winter the son of the world
And Susan the daughter of Man
The winter is yours, a gift to a girl
From a boy in the season of light