Winter Poetry
Blizzard
The night is so wild with snow
I fear the world might lose its way
and fall back into yesterday,
or race so fast instead
tumbles several days ahead.
And I would be left standing by
In a house of wind and a roof of sky.
EBO
Written during the New Year’s Eve of my senior year in high school. My friends and I were on our way to a party which we did not want to miss. It was snowy and windy. We could not see the road or the side of the road so we had to turn back. Safely home again, I penciled this poem in my Scribble-In Book.
Wind in my Pocket, Breakwater Books, 1990
Wind Dance, Scholastic Canada, 1999
Winter Journey
In goose-down fields
we leave our tracks
while black-crow cliffs
look down our backs.
Over porcupine hills
we make our way
to the red fox sun
on the side of day.
EBO
When I was young and our family was driving along in the Maine countryside, I would stare out the window. I would watch the landscape and compare things to something else. One time when we were driving north into Aroostook County, I saw a hill and exclaimed, “That hill looks just like a porcupine!” I loved metaphor and didn’t know it.
Many years later when I was snowshoeing toward evening and the sun was spreading itself on the side of day, I thought of the red fox. Then I put this poem together adding two more metaphors for a winter journey.
Write a poem using metaphor, “calling something, something else!”
Wind Dance, Scholastic Canada, 1999
Winter Reading
I curl up
in Winter’s lap
and listen
to her icy tales.
I shiver
and I cannot sleep
though round
she wraps
her blanket deep
and keeps
a sliver of a light
through the dark
chapters of the night.
EBO
I love a winter’s night. Outside the clear cold, the quiet sky, the friendly stars. The snow. The early sliver of the moon. And inside, the fire in the stove, a cozy chair, a soft blanket and a crescent moon outside the window. A good book to read and new poems to write. So this one, “Winter Reading.”
How does what I describe about the night in prose compare with what I write in the poem?
Wind Dance, Scholastic Canada, 1999
Arctic Fox
White as the white of snow on snow,
he curls in the whirls of the arctic blow;
we can’t see him sleep and we can’t see him go –
white as the white of snow on snow.
EBO
“Chickadee,” January, 1987
Wind in my Pocket, Breakwater Books, 1990
Wind Dance, Scholastic Canada, 1999
Winter Choice
This shovel,
That shovel,
which one shall I choose
to shovel
shining chunks of snow
from the shingles
of my roof?
This shovel,
That shovel,
I shall put them back.
I can’t shovel
chunks of snow
from the shingles
on my shack.
This wind,
That wind,
I shall ask instead,
“Will you please blow
the chunks of snow
from the shingles
on my shed?”
EBO
Wind in my Pocket, Breakwater Books, 1990
Contrast
I look upon a winter’s day;
the earth and sky climb gray on gray.
I walk and watch the lightened lines
of snow against the darkened pines.
But when I see the passing crow,
I know the whiteness of the crow.
EBO
Newfoundland Quarterly