A winter poem.
Pittsburgh is lousy with snow this January, but I wrote this poem during what we Yukoners would call a Chinook.
A Chinook is a warm wind that ushers in the scent of winter’s end, even for an afternoon. Kids shed their mitts and coats, waging snowball assaults in t-shirts, and the animals in the forest emerge to taste the early promise of thaw.
Consider December
How I desire
to glory as they do
in the abundance
of water,
in a few degrees of change.
To revel like the bathing robin,
ducking and drinking
in the pooling stream.
To rejoice in the melting
signs of winter
if only for a day.
A day that,
but for the slant of light,
could be spring
with all the chatter in the boughs.
The flirtatious kinglet,
the merry party of sparrows,
waste not this mild morning
and their snow-sweet drink.
Come, come,
they seem to sing.
Taste and see.
Today we have all we need.