Late Winter Light, One Sunday

Mark Tredinnick

after Gary Snyder, “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout”

Clouds at a canter through late winter light.

The four o’clock air a high-country creek among tussock grasses.

Such moments are one’s past

And all the years that will come after.

Cumulus in soft armadas bear the last sun east,

And ravens, beneath them—a litter of voices, quicker than silence.

After she passed, I stood awhile, a heron unsteady in shallows.

One day I will slip the world, too, and how much I miss it already

In light like this. But there are lives that never know such peace—

I wish them this fast forgiveness of weather,

in which every name is said, and all time begun again.

MARK TREDINNICK is an Australian poet who lives and writes along the Wingecarribee southwest of Sydney. He is the managing editor of 5 Islands Press; his many books include, most recently, House of Thieves (One Hundred Poems); his New & Selected Poems appears in 2026.