In Rogues Island we are expecting our first snow storm of the year tonight.
I must be a New Englander to the marrow, because I l
ove it.
By mid-February snow may get tiresome, but the
first storms are
always
exciting and deeply satisfying to me.
There is something cleansing, restorative, about the snow; something very pleasing
about the stillness, the quiet, the way it impedes and muffles our headlong hurtling
--our frenetic ant-like scurrying.
I want to share this Thomas Hardy poem with you. I received it in an email yesterday.
I thought I was familiar with all of Hardy's poems but I either missed this one or I have
forgotten it.
PS
Beneath the Hardy poem is one of my own.
(Shame on me for placing mine alongside Hardy's!
)
I hope you'll like at least
one of them.
--jjorge
"Snow in the Suburbs,"
Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.
A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.
The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.
( Thomas Hardy )
*******************
Letter To My Brother In San Francisco'
Dear David,
The rumor's true.
Winter has wrapped our sick and tired
world in the customary bandages.
Soon enough they'll be discolored - fouled
by the residue of our strivings.
But for today all is wrapped in a healing whiteness.
It's just as you remember:
The stillness of yard and street,
the trees transformed, the quiet!
( jjorge 12-7-02 )
