by Ayesha Siddiqui

January
We take a walk in the Medina
Once mighty
Now a bed of exposed stone
Her sun bleached backbone
Snaking the path ahead
Does she dream anymore
Her stripped banks rise twenty feet
A songbird startles in a rare puddle
The trees, pebbles quiet
Too tired for even a sad song.
by Ayesha Siddiqui

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January, in the Northern Hemisphere, is a time that no one escapes. Despite sunshine or snowfall, we all are contained within the glumness of short days, the weight of having to take down our holiday decorations, with no merriment in sight for months. It’s a time of perhaps too much contemplation, wondering if no rain yet this season means weeks of cloud cover and storms, if the land we walk on will remain recognizable even a decade from now.

All around us it feels empty. Branches, bushes, banks of rivers, it is all without. Perhaps this is why humans created time this way. Emptiness is the beginning. What else could it be? That is what January provides.

Resolutions and any sort of push towards accomplishment feel antithetical to what the season asks from us. Writers absorb the world around them. The jade bush outside your door is not flowering, yet you expect yourself to somehow have a thousand blooms overnight.

For those getting ready to start another year again on the page, here is an offering:

1) There will be emptiness
2) Then contemplation
3) Then words
4) Then the beginning of something, again.