This week’s poem, Chystena Hahn’s “Maine Winter,” is a homage to the season we’ve just started experiencing in its full splendor. I love this poem’s formal acuity in the repeating lines and rhymes of a villanelle, and how it vividly reminds us of the beauty we receive as recompense for our long Maine winters.

Hahn has been a teacher, a facilitator of teacher practice, a writing instructor, a mom, a faculty wife and daughter to an aging mom. She calls herself “an incorrigible Mainer” and “a wanderer.”

Maine Winter
A Villanelle

By Chrystena Hahn

Where winter lasts four months or more each year,
no dark deep woods nor heft of church bells touch
the beauty of the light, spare and austere.

The time ‘tween rise and sunset counted dear—
Be still! We bide, because there is no rush:
where winter lasts four months or more each year.

Ice forms on land at point of water’s reach,
Snow billows in a single-colored plush—
The beauty of the light is most austere.

Fine lines of snow and ice limn branches bare
while drifts pile onto evergreens in tufts
where winter lasts four months or more each year.

Eclipsed by clouds, the sun does not appear.
Somnambulists brave winter’s forceful crush,
the beauty of the light is so austere.

Let others speak of winter as severe
and say their winter light is far more lush:
Where winter lasts four months or more each year,
The beauty of the light is most austere

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Maine Winter,” copyright 2022 by Chystena Hahn, appears by permission of the author.