Poem: Plea to Winter

Plea to Winter

By John Grey
QuailBellMagazine.com

Please, no more snow.
Please, no more of this bitter wind.

 
But it's more snow than we've had in years,
piling up, so deep it swallows the car
in the driveway as well as its usual appetizers
of garden and hedge.
And every snow flake is different,
as if I need to know that.
Sure, and every man, woman and child,
is an individual but try telling that to me
if there were ten billion of them
squeezed into my front yard.
And I don't want to hear how
beautiful the trees are,
dead branches crystallized,
evergreens buffed white
like a painting from a Christmas card.
 
And no more deaths.
Enough with the people carried out
of here in coffins.
 
Heavy footprints in the snow.
I know what that means.
None deeper than those where
the church steps used to be
before they were buried.
Winter of time, winter of lives.
And the snow keeps falling,
wind won't ease up for anything.
 
It's as if the weather wants me to make
the connection.
Can't really go anywhere.
I'm trapped in the house.
Like people are trapped in their bodies.
And the snow of age piles up.
And the wind blows so we feel it.
 
So please, no more snow charting our cabin fever lives here.
Please, no more wind plotting a course we can't follow.