Elliot Rose comments on our dismal weather

Sun, damn it, I want sun: After the endless grey Fast and famine of winter, winter is done: Let us have bright sun: Bright sun at break of day...

Many of you will remember Elliot Rose, beloved HT parishioner, U of T professor, and poet.

I’m fed up with this dismal weather, and Elliot sums it all up with this glorious vision.

Margot

Sun, damn it, I want sun:
After the endless grey
Fast and famine of winter, winter is done:
Let us have bright sun:
Bright sun at break of day
Gold under eyelids, stripes on ceilings white
Lit yellow skin, buttercups under chin,
No more night, no more blight
Bodies wake to delight:
“Sumer is ycumen in”
Let us breathe blue, royal blue, indigo
Sapphire, azure and aquamarine
Gut deep and belly full:
Paint our skins on the inside deepest blue
With gold beading and rainbow trim between,
Blue lungs and livers and all
Finest insides that ever were seen
Bright lacquer and enamel shades that shine
In all our inward caves: colours that burn
Right through the outer husk and print the skin
With permanent freckles
Let us abolish clothes and clocks, and clean
Undo remembrance of time-has-been:
Burn Winter on a pyre and dance around
A pasteboard greybeard crackling with squibs
And sneezing gunpowder: see Winter die
In the last of all fires: consign him to the ground
The new and timeless time is ours:
Let us drink flowers,
Let us eat gold. Life has begun. We are the Sun.

Untitled poem by Elliot Rose
January 1994

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