December 2024

Winter is well and truly here with the arrival of December, and we have a particularly fitting poem to share this month. ‘Winter’ from Alexander McCall Smith’s debut poetry collection In A Time of Distance muses on the opportunities this season provides to re-evaluate the important things in life.

Winter

That there should be winter, that this hard light
 Should fall over a December Scotland,
 Should make the sea grey, like steel, and the land itself
 A rock rising from metalled water;
 That there should be empty skies,
 Free of protecting cloud, too cold
 Even for that; that there should be
 A vapour trail of some great jet heading west
 To the colder shores of Greenland, Labrador,
 Northern neighbours to us, distant cousins
 In our marginality and our pursuit of fish;
 That all this should be in a land that in summer
 Is so soft and wet with drifting veils of rain
 And filled with deer and clouds of midges
 And the rich fecundity of ploughed fields
 That will yield gold barley and whisky
 Beyond the barley –
 
Scotland is a country of attenuated light,
 And temperate-to-inhospitable seasons;
 Freshness and cold skies lie behind
 All our signs, our way so being;
 I sometimes wish, I confess, for a life spent
 In the scent of wild thyme and olive trees,
 For evenings when one might stroll
 Slowly about a square and watch pigeons
 Launch themselves into Italian air
 From some tower dreamed up
 
By some High Renaissance imagination;
 That, though, is not where we are from
 Or where we are destined to be;
 Our place is north, our natural gravity
 That of a land that is an afterthought
 To Europe, a land that comes late
 To so many of the parties it’s been invited to,
 But which we love with all our heart,
 With all our heart.
 Winter doesn’t make us better, then, or worse,
 But enables us to find ourselves again,
 Because it forces us to be quiet, obliges us
 To listen to the coursing of our own blood;

 Winter reminds us that warmth
 Is not something we find naturally,
 Some gift of munificent nature, but must be made;
 That we should make in Scotland
 A small place of warmth, a small country
 Of kindness to others, of brotherhood,
 Is what our poets have been striving to say
 Since they first gave voice to song.
 That we might find this, in winter,
 In a troubled world, is a local miracle,
 To warm the heart, to warm the heart.

In A Time of Distance and Alexander’s most recent collection I Think of You are both available from Polygon now.