Category: Poetry

Breaking Story

Karla Linn Merrifield
       for Laury Egan

Now in the hour of tempest’s descent
with chaos-shaping clouds, wind, snow, waves
causing closure of schools, closure
of highways and railways and subways,
and the many-jeweled bridges of the boroughs,
but none for the widow across the Hudson River,
atop the highlands, who keenly observes
the rewriting of Sandy Hook, the erasure
of dunes, the deletion of beaches, beach grasses.
It is no wonder she shrinks from storm’s hysteria
as it thrashes its way into epochal history.

In the house of the dead, a blizzard smothers
a diminished spirit and her brittle heart crashes.

Karla Linn Merrifield

Iced

Ann Howells

November was caustic. December astringent.
Chimneys became harmonicas.
Windows shook like tambourines.
January skies curdled, built cobblestone ice.
Walkways shattered into concrete jigsaws.
February scythed ice sheets from rooftops.
The dog, shamefaced, left puddles and piles
embellishing the stoop. March felled a neighbor —
purple ankle propped and, ironically, iced.
April lawns hover beneath snowfields and drifts.
Daffodils claw upward through frozen earth.

Ann Howells

Not Everything About Winter is Winter

Peter Stewart O’Grady

Sometimes it’s crisp frozen leaves,
mud crunched steps, the crazy paved
surface on frozen puddles, the shapes
of naked trees, and the sun slung low
into your blinking eyes, your shadow
stretched out further than you want.
Snow lying unviolated by footprints. 

Those shrinking days that invited
the cold to reconfigure everything
for the year ahead, and their slow
stretch letting Christmas seep in
under the door, tempt us to reserve
a moment to toast by the fire, watch
logs exhaust themselves to ashes.

Peter Stewart O’Grady

The Hibernation

Anna Lindsay

Numbness narcotised while I was unaware.

I knew the cold was coming,
watched winter take you, breath
by icy breath, into its lair,
and saw you, grateful, sink without despair
into its one-way care.

I felt I could fend off the cold,
and thought I was prepared
for icicles to sting before the spring—
never realising I was already pinned,
hunkering in hibernation, soul-systems stalled,
sensation numbed, heartbeats dulled
to torpor through the years.

I thought the cold was distant, well-controlled,
’til light’s frail tendril found its way
into my darkened den. Now I comprehend
that grieving sleep was after all obeyed:
that what I’d dreamt was waking
had simply been heart’s faking:
snow-cold, breath hold, hurt-souled… 

But now a new year calls, thaw’s set, and I
awake from slumber’s thralls.
Winter’s melting: spring strokes my hair.

Anna Lindsay

Descending melody

Emily Ford

The wind is set to D minor
the sky drops its opera
first on the heads and shoulders of the land
then in our front gardens
the lyrics go like this
        done we are done, bury it all
I want to take my clothes off
and lie in the snow
I want osmosis
I want to fall upon the world
        the laughter is too piercing
        dull it
we shiver not from cold
not always
sometimes we shiver
because we recognise
the voice that makes the pines bristle
        the grass is too green, blanket
        all in white, toss the air opaque
cupping mugs of brief comfort
draping multicoloured lights
across dead things and facades
        block out the sun
holding each other
under duvets under blankets
        block the roads, separate them
nesting in couch corners
lighting spiced candles
shuffling carbs from cupboards
to ovens to plates
        darken their mornings
when the worst happens,
there is comfort in this
blustering melancholy
        they will see nothing beyond their feet

Emily Ford

A Cycle of Endings

Amanda Crum

At 13, he was too young to reminisce;
he did it anyway, at the behest of the citrine sky.
It was always the same when winter came.
Snow covered those summer fields and
dusk took them into its cloak of shadows, a cycle of endings
that somehow always came as a surprise. The barn lights called him home
earlier and earlier, into deepening purple and cold toes.
He slid one hand along the slushy horse fence,
a lifeline between the trees,
and remembered his mama in her bed,
how quickly her ending had come around.
How quickly they always do.

Amanda Crum

Snow is a Blanket Fort My Children Built

Matthew Miller

I wake to find it already falling.

Morning traffic
pulling the corners,
the weakest clouds
break, cannot cushion
hasty whispers.

Sighing, mouth wide to sky’s
silence, I crawl through
tangled arms, scaping
what has piled
to provide a way out. 

Children despair over
what’s been buried.
All the knots and tucks,
labyrinthine beauty, a crystal
that could not be held.

I know they cannot imagine
the unique myriads building
in their own hands.

Matthew Miller

The Blizzard of ‘96

Merril D. Smith

A nor’easter the forecasters said–

as the wind laid a snowy quilt over sidewalks and streets,
and the frost-brittled lawn was transformed, a frozen expanse,
an Arctic sea; the steps and basement windows were thickly coated,
a layer of Wite-out erased everything that existed before the storm.

Too cold to be outside, our daughters sent their Barbies
on adventures through time and space,
to nineteenth-century Concord, to the USS Enterprise,

but they found their way back
to giggle-slurp hot cocoa and munch oven-warm cookies–
amidst the scent of cinnamon, chocolate, and wet wool,
I was strangely content,
as we bided in this cocoon of frosty white,
waiting to emerge and fly toward the sun.

Merril D. Smith

in a dream i kiss my father’s dead mouth

Karson

and meet the cold lips
of a boy crying
in the endless maw
of an irish winter
council house doors
frozen shut
windows playing movies
of his mother smoking
her lungs sticky
with her son’s name
ashes falling from her fingers
his father’s name
burning his shoulders like snow
filling up the glass
until he can’t see her anymore
the ice-covered doorstep is no bed
for a child but he will sleep there
waiting for morning to cocoon
its dry breath around him
and birth him
into another
starving christmas
year after year until finally
i am born
and immediately i begin
the dutiful work
of dying
and so he nails
his skin to my bones
in hopes it might melt
with me
in the warm embrace
of my incubator coffin
which instead
becomes a boat
setting sail
into
the floods

Karson

Intimations of Death, Passing through Connecticut

James Dowthwaite

Harlem 125th St

It is a cold morning, Cimmerian,
and the last of the snowfall
and the last of the night
collude in the air of departure,
enclosing the forty-one
who wait on the platform.
Harlem’s ghosts are lost,
as they rise from the midair,
caught with the half life
of breath,
turning and twisting
in its pathetic ascension.
Even talk freezes at this hour
and they are quiet,
those waiting on the platform,
acquiescing themselves
into the last of the snowfall
and the last of the night.

Greenwich

On the train window,
water’s ghost
casts a veil over the glass,
like a frozen lake,
becoming the border
between the living in the carriage
and the dead outside.
The snow, which in the city
is wrapped around Main St
like a Kashmir scarf,
faces us here in its blank aspect,
casting the trees, the fields,
and the houses in strangeness,
and life takes on the uncanny form
of the photo’s negative,
and being itself is quieted.

Westport

By the railroad bridge in Westport
a crust of ice plagues the Saugatuck;
The sky is a soft metal, platinum,
being hammered into form
as the light plays upon its cooling.
The ice clears before the houses
with their snow-banked lawns
and spare trees, concealing little,
and the fallen snow pulls the light,
jealously gathering the view
from the brittle branches,
each one a memorial
to the long-departed leaves,
remembered only by the dark water.

Bridgeport

No cars, the boats all sealed,
their white covers catching the light;
there is no one here, the whole of Connecticut
as if every living being
had dissolved into winter
and its languid snowfalls.
The sky is sepia above the Veterans’ Park
where the lethargic wind
lifts only half the flag,
the stars lost in its folds
as on a clouded night.
A lone crane
salutes the steel water
while the empty berths
lie demarcated
like graves in the harbour;
and the train passes by
unheralded.

New Haven 

So this is New England,
where the old comes though
as a palimpsest,

or a half-ghost
half-seen in the mirror,
halfway on its departure.
And out there,
beyond Sandy Point,
beyond Long Island,
the dark Atlantic rages
and in its fury
holds off the snow.

James Dowthwaite