Soon it will be her day, this unfamiliar Goddess I only know from fleeting glimpses. Red ribbons set out on the boughs at dusk, retrieved with blessing against drowning after morning’s dew. Candles of pale blue lit at times of crisis and illness throughout the turning year.

They say she’s Goddess of smithcraft. Does she wield a ringing hammer in some smokey, charcoal-fired building? Does the water hiss as illumined red snarls into blackness? Does she coax great curves of copper into voluptuous vessels?

I wrote a poem once for her day, about loss and disintegration, followed by resolution, resurrection. Perhaps these snowdrop days have that sense, of slight shy signs of persistence and hope among the harsh snows and leafless trees. Do they have a scent? I think they might, and yet I barely wake up enough from churlishness of the dark half to bother to breathe it in.