Winter (Hivern, de Miquel Martí i Pol)

Winter landscape, New South Wales. Photograph by MDRX.

Winter

I love the quiet of gardens,

and the swollen red hands of bricklayers.

I love the tenderness of rain

and the uncertain steps of the aged on the snow.

I love the trees with frost-drawings

and the quite of evenings by the heater.

I love the never-ending nights

and the people hurrying out of the cinema.

Winter isn’t sad:

It is a little melancholic,

with a white and most intimate melancholy.

Winter is not the cold and the snow:

it is to forget the preponderance of green,

an ever-hopeful restart.

Winter is not foggy days:

it is a rare suppleness of light

on objects. Winter is silence,

it is the town in silence,

it is the silence of homes

and that of rooms

and that of people who look, behind the windows,

how snow unifies horizons 

and makes everything

poignantly close and attainable. 

Translation from the original poem in Catalan by Miquel Martí i Pol. 

Ⓒ J. Salavert, 2020