March Snow

March Snow


If this were the beginning of a poem,
She would call it the silence of snow.
If she hadn’t been so alone,
If she hadn’t been so tired,
If she’d paid a bit more attention
To the snowflakes
Swirling out of the sky like hope;
She might have realized
That she was traveling straight into a blizzard.

She might have seen at the start
That she was setting out on a journey
That would change her life forever
And she could have chosen to turn back.
But the thought didn’t even cross her mind.
She lost herself to the light,
In the snowflakes whirling
More wildly in the wind,
And she didn’t see the danger of her future,
But only the promise
Pointing to the way back to the happiness
And purity she had once known as a child."

Cleansed by memories of innocence,
She succumbed to optimism
And dared to believe herself
At home in the world.
In the middle of the night,
Before getting into bed,
She padded across the room in her nightgown,
And parted the curtain,
And watched the thick, heavy snowflakes
Falling without end into the water.

The sight spoke of a strange
And powerful loneliness.
It was as if she were in a place
The whole world had forgotten,
As if it were snowing
At the end of the world.