Embers
Henri Cole

Poor summer, it doesn't know it's dying.
A few days are all it has. Still, the lake
is with me, its strokes of blue-violet
and the fiery sun replacing loneliness.
I feel like an animal that has found a place.
This is my burrow, my nest, my attempt
to say, I exist. A rose can't shut itself
and be a bud again. It's a malady,
wanting it. On the shore, the moon sprinkles
light over everything, like a campfire,
and in the green-black night, the tall pines
hold their arms out as God held His arms
out to say that He was lonely and that
He was making Himself a man.

© 2006 The New Republic, LLC

Oak trees in the fog in Abbey Fields.

Since Wednesday morning, a cold fog has lain heavily over much of England. Hundreds of flights have been cancelled out of Heathrow, and Coventry Airport has been closed. The fog is expected to last through the day tomorrow, which was expected to be the busiest day for air travel in the entire year. 2006 has also been the warmest year in England since systematic temperature records began in 1659. While the forecast holds out little hope for a white Christmas, the fog does seem like more traditional English Christmas weather. Here's a passage from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol:

Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.