The first grade boy in his new blue glasses
stands in a bank of other children,
cardboard snowflakes hung on strings
around their necks,
reciting a poem about snow.
Outside the library’s picture windows
the fat flakes fall, real and cold.
The storm builds; soft high drifts over the roads,
bare black trees outlined in creamy emphasis.
The trees are transformed into a flock of zebras!
And on the freezing metal bars of the jungle gym
where sweat-slick kids’ palms
slipped and swung, only a few months ago,
pure crusts accrue. The poem goes on falling,
quietly, rhythmically,
"snow," and "hollow," and "wild winds blow,"
even though the black letters
have lifted off the white page
and flown, like a swoop of ravens,
into the blizzard’s blank mouth.
The boy remembers his part,
while in the audience his mother watches
her breath made flesh,
made word,
its meaning multiplying as it lands
so softly on the surface of the known world.


This poem first appeared in Kalliope.
Used here with the author’s permission.