My name is Podrigotuma and I lived in Australia for four years and when I was moving back to Ireland

somebody said to me, oh God, you're going to miss the sun, you know, you'd be there in all that long grey year of Ireland.

And I remember realizing in the moment how wrong they were.

I was really looking forward to getting back to the Irish climate.

I know not everybody loves it, but I do.

I don't mind ten months of grey and lots of mist and rain because there's something nurturing about it for me.

So used to it, there's something about walks in the drizzle that I've always loved.

I'm going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense by Dennis Smith.

Oh California, don't you know the sun is only a god if you learn to starve for her?

I'm over the ocean. I stood at its lip dressed in down, praying for snow.

I know I'm strange. Too much light makes me nervous, at least in this land where the trees always bear green.

I know something that doesn't die can't be beautiful.

Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California?

The sun above you, the snow and stalled sea, a field of mirror, all demanding to be the sun.

Everything around you is light and it's gorgeous and if you stay too long it will kill you.

It's so sad, you know. You're the only warm thing from miles, the only thing that can't shine.

I laughed out loud the first time I read this poem. I thought it was magnificent.

It's such a magnificent poem about place and point of view and seasons and time as well.

Dennis Smith is an extraordinary poet because they take old styles of poem sometimes, a sonnet or a style like this,

which is a certain kind of what's called pathetic fallacy in poetry,

where the internal workings of the poet are manifested in the external workings of the season,

and in the external workings of the weather. So if a poet's sad, it's raining, if a poet's happy, the sun is out.

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