The First of December

A whiff of winter in the air,

It’s the first day of December, I’m aware -

Is the weather intimate with the calendar,

The way it’s announced the onset of winter?

We’re done with autumn, I know,

For the X’mas decorations are in full flow:

Tinsel and holly and glitter and red -

They’re signaling a birth and an end.

As each year, I wonder at this time:

Where exactly did it go, this year of mine?

A year in which I’d promised myself -

I’d finish a book, become a better mother, writer and wife.

The book is done, the rest is same ole myself...

A constant work in progress,

A year older, wiser - perhaps?

For I do know this much -

The wisdom of age has less to do with the passage of time,

It is, instead, what I did with that time.

Eventually, in the great crucible of life,

In that long walk home that we call life,

Love is the arbiter of all our acts.

Was I loved? Did I love well?

Did that sentence convey what I meant to say?

Shouldn’t I be more patient with my daughter every day?

If, at the end of a day of writing,

I still have nothing I’m happy with,

Surely, hubby can be spared forthwith,

My tetchy, grumpy hedgehogy-writerly being?

So, come December, I welcome you!

You’re my chance to renew, regrow and revise.

I am mine to make over and over -

End-of-year, you're my saviour!