Twelfth Night - Decorations down

Here's a love poem about taking down the Christmas decorations. It was published by the Huddersfield Examiner 06/01/2007.

Decorations

The season’s passed; the trimmings come to floor

From where I’d fixed them at your well-judged mark.

But your bright beauty won’t go back to store

Along with lights that flashed once in the dark.

Your beauty needs no extra signs for me;

No festive letters shouting out ‘Rejoice!’.

In each ball’s shining surface I still see

Your perfect face by any painter’s choice.

Unlike full-fruited Nature, bought and pinned

Through its stem to wall at trophy height,

Your beauty’s free – not bauble to be binned

Or boxed away in cupboards out of sight.

Now I will see in place of those things there

Not emptiness, but beauty all this year.

Stuart Larner