A little poem

Thank a really slow Internet for this one — I wrote it mostly while waiting for pages to load. I could have taken a picture to illustrate it, but I'll spare you the bone-chilling (literally) details.


Poem for a March blizzard

The pick-up truck outside the window,
The one that generally gets my husband to work when the plow has yet to go through,
Is a little hazy,
It’s form showing clearer, or not, depending on the whim of the wind.
(The truck went nowhere today. My husband stayed in his pajamas.)
The rings on my daughter’s swingset are hazier still,
Their ghostly handles doing a frantic dance, not stopping to let Sofia grab on
Until this arctic wind finds someplace to rest —
Maybe in Minnesota, where there are trees,
Or perhaps Missouri, where someone was smart enough
To put up mountains.
The fence across the road is nearly gone, disappearing often in the swirling snow.
The trees beyond them, the neighboring farms, the town where we’d go for a gallon of milk —
They are gone completely, lost in a wall of white.
They have become mere memories, as far removed from our reality
As the tulips under the six-foot drifts, under the coating of ice, under the frozen ground.
The white of the window is too bright to gaze upon for long.
So we turn inward, to the comfort of the internet and the television,
Reveling in those 2-D images of the warm-weather world —
A fine activity for a Tuesday afternoon, we say,
And try not to remember that we have no choice.
The rest of the world is gone,
And won’t be back until tomorrow noon, at the earliest.