[POEMS] For a Snowy Day

These are poems I wrote during two separate winters in Tennessee. The first, I wrote today, following an ice storm that destroyed trees, took out power lines, and left the city a somewhat treacherous wonderland. The second, with a more cheerful tone, I wrote two years ago after a lovely snow week. 

Nonetheless, the Morn

A winter storm has stilled the spinning earth.

Encased, it waits for sleet-gray clouds to pass;

And pink spring buds, in delicate new birth,

Now suffocate beneath the timeless glass.

The boughs of trees are stripped, the streets are bound;

Falling ice is like a death toll ringing.

Its severed spirit grips the iron ground;

Silent is the world that once was singing.

There, ice, like sharpened silver tinsel, shines

Upon a wasteland shattered by the cold,

Until the sun, to fiery cause resigned, 

In war eternal, burns alight with gold.

And so the trees emerge with branches shorn,

To morning scourged, but nonetheless, the morn.

If you wake up in the morning…

If you wake up in the morning 

And the world is still and quiet,

Then it snowed while you were sleeping

And the snow is soft and silent.

Like a blanket in the darkness,

It has draped over the branches;

It has fallen on the rooftops 

In a daze of snowflake dances. 

It has whispered on the windowpanes, 

Across scattered, frosty windshields, 

It has settled on the winter plains, 

And in the frozen, silver wheatfields. 

It has polished silt-black riversides

Into sheets of crisp white crystal,

And whittled lakes of purest shine

With a piercing, cobalt chisel.

And now the sunlight glows like gold

On the symphony of snowbanks,

A melt of milk and honey through

The glittering gelid cascades.

And the world is still and quiet here,

Beneath a glassy, light blue sky;

The world is soft and silent here,

In the warm bed where you lie.

And the world is just and peaceful here,

And the sun is glowing bright,

And the world is kind and gentle here,

Because the snow fell late last night.