Snow

Yesterday's snow reminded of this poem that I ran across last summer. It is such a rich poem, so full of meaning and important messages.

Snow

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Once with my scarf knotted over my mouth
I lumbered into a storm of snow up the long hill
and did not know where I was going except to the top of it.
In those days we went out like that.
Even children went out like that.
Someone was crying hard at home again,
raging blizzard of sobs.

I dragged the sled by its rope,
which we normally did not do
when snow was coming down so hard,
pulling my brother whom I called by our secret name
as if we could be other people under the skin.
The snow bit into my face, prickling the rim
of the head where the hair starts coming out.
And it was a big one. It would come down and down
for days. People would dig their cars out like potatoes.

How are you doing back there? I shouted,
and he said Fine, I’m doing fine,
in the sunniest voice he could muster
and I think I should love him more today
for having used it.

At the top we turned and he slid down,
steering himself with the rope gripped in
his mittened hands. I stumbled behind
sinking deeply, shouting Ho! Look at him go!
as if we were having a good time.
Alone on the hill. That was the deepest
I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it
when I stare at paper or into silences
between human beings. The drifting
accumulation. A father goes months
without speaking to his son.

How there can be a place
so cold any movement saves you.

Ho! You bang your hands together,
stomp your feet. The father could die!
The son! Before the weather changes.

"Snow" from Fuel by Naomi Shihab Nye.

A New Poet

Linda Pastan is new to me. Sometimes I read a poem that seem to exactly express my thoughts and feelings and she describes that experience here. With every such poem I edge one step closer to finding my own voice.

New Poet

Linda Pastan

 

Finding a new poet

is like finding a new wildflower

out in the woods. You don't see

its name in the flower books, and

nobody you tell believes

in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows

down the whole length of the page. In fact

the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea

on a foggy day - the odor of truth

and of lying.

And the words are so familiar,

so strangely new, words

you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil

or a pen or even a paintbrush,

if only there had been a flower.

from Heroes In Disguise, 1991

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY

Poetry, like life, is all about seeing the connections. 

I like the connections Pastan draws in this poem.

Prosody 101

Linda Pastan

When they taught me that what mattered most
was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping
over the page but the variations
in that line and the tension produced
on the ear by the surprise of difference,
I understood yet didn't understand
exactly, until just now, years later
in spring, with the trees already lacy
and camellias blowsy with middle age,
I looked out and saw what a cold front had done
to the garden, sweeping in like common language,
unexpected in the sensuous
extravagance of a Maryland spring.
There was a dark edge around each flower
as if it had been outlined in ink
instead of frost, and the tension I felt
between the expected and actual
was like that time I came to you, ready
to say goodbye for good, for you had been
a cold front yourself lately, and as I walked in
you laughed and lifted me up in your arms
as if I too were lacy with spring
instead of middle aged like the camellias,
and I thought: so this is Poetry!