FROST...

AN OLD MAN'S WINTER NIGHT (Robert Frost 1874-1963) excerpts

All out of doors looked darkly in at him through the thin frost, 

 almost in separate stars, that gathers on the pane in empty rooms.

What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze 

was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.

And scared the outer night, which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar of trees and crack of branches...

common things.........

Where now he sat, concerned with what he knew what,

A quiet light, and then not even that.

He consigned to the moon, such as she was,

So late-arising, to the broken moon

As better than the sun in any case

For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,

His icicles along the wall to keep;

And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt

Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted, and eased his heavy breathing,

but still slept.

One aged man--one man---can't keep a house, a farm, a countryside,

it's thus he does it of a winter night.

Photographs 2026 "An Old Man's Winter Night" first published in 1916 

(Mountain Interval collection) by Robert Frost is in the public domain
 

WINTER with the BIRDS...

Hawk

"I am the Hawk. Share in the freedom I feel when I fly..."-John Denver

Finches

"Birds witness the most beautiful mornings in this world..." 

                        -Mehmet Murat Idan

Flicker suet duel

"No bird soars too high if he soars with its own wings..." -William Blake

winter Viburnum

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.” -Edith Sitwell

Finch

"Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark..."

 -Rabindranath Tagore
                                                    

"Frost grows on the window glass, forming patterns of lovely translucent geometry...

"Breathe on the glass, and you give frost more ammunition...

"Now it can build castles, and cities, and whole ice continents with your breath's vapour...

"In a few blinks you can see the winter fairies moving in...

Hunting mode

But first, you hear the crackle of their wings..." -Vera Nazarian

Grackle

"I pray this winter be gentle and kind..." -John Geddes

“At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.”- E.B.White

"Now is the time of fresh starts. This is the season that makes everything new..." -Vivian Swift

Towhee

"In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted..." 

-Mark Doty

Stellar Jays

"Flight – that’s the word. They beat in the air like wings, as if reluctant ever to touch the ground. I have observed them coming down, on a very cold day, near its end when the sky above me was still blue, in flakes great and wide as the palm of my hand. They were like immense moths winging down in the twilight, making the silence about me visible.”

                                                                           -Howard O'Hagan

Photographs 2026

IN THE JANUARY DUSK...

"There's a special quality to the loneliness of the dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night's..."-Ed Gorman

"The whisper of the dusk is the night shedding its husk..."

-Dean Koontz

                           "Dusk is an illusion..." -Nicholas Sparks

"Dance with me. Dance with me into the colours of the dusk..."

                                                                      -Ben Harper

                       "....dusk is the time..." -Simon Raven

"Let me bathe my soul in colours.Let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow..." -Khalil Gabrin

"Out of the dusk, a shadow..." -John B. Tabb

"Already there is dusk, instead of darkness at five in the afternoon. Already hope is stirring at the edges of the day..." 

- Kathleen Noris

"There is no dusk to be. There is no dawn that was. Only there's now, and now, and the wind in the grass..." -A. MacLeish

"I came home in the dusk, with my ears ringing in the quiet..." 

-Tim Winton

"Watching the day slowly bloom into night..."-Patricia A. McKillip

"Contrary to the general belief about photography, you don't need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days." -Jack Kerouac

"This is my favourite time of day. Light and dark touch for a few moments...." -R. McBride

"There was a filmy veil of soft, dull mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects, giving them a lilac hue..." -Elizabeth Gaskell

"Every moment of this strange and lovely life from dawn to dusk, is a miracle. Somewhere, always a rose is opening its petals to the dawn. Somewhere, always, a flower is fading in the dusk." -Beverly Nichols

Photographs 2026