poems about winter

Poem of the Week, by Kevin Hart

Posted on by alisonmcghee

It’s been wildly snowy here in Minneapolis in a way that brings me straight back to childhood in far upstate New York, where we lived so far out in the country that the only lights at night were the ones inside our house.

If you went outside and looked up on a clear night, the sky wasn’t dark. It was a field of diamonds, strewn so thick that sometimes stars blurred into each other. You could see the Milky Way and sometimes the northern lights. On winter nights, if it were snowing –and it was always snowing, there in the foothills of the Adirondacks–those stars spun their way down to earth in the form of snowflakes.

This past week in the city brought childhood back to me. Endless shoveling. Laughing with my neighbors about where can we possibly put all this snow. The mesmerizing beauty of tree limbs weighted with snow. The hush. The calm. The stillness.

Snow, by Kevin Hart

Some days
the snow has taken me in
to know the time of snow, to live
inside a world so quiet

its music
is all a shimmering. Some evenings
when quite alone
I turn off every light

and watch the snow
enjoy the dark, moving lushly
through spiky air,
finding more time

in time
than when I stretch myself
and am
my father’s father. Oh yes,

there is
a sparkling choir, there surely is,
and dark ice air
through which we fall.

Click here for more information about Kevin Hart.

alisonmcghee.com

My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Wallace Stevens

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Late night. Eight inches of heavy wet flakes. Sound of shovels up and down the block. The specific silence of air that comes only with snow.

Lifelong northerner that I am, snow is part of my earliest memories. Snow so deep my sisters and I could walk right up onto the roof of the garage and slide down the other side.

When I go to California in January, the way I do now, I think about snow. Dream of it. Miss the way, when you breathe in that cold, cold air, your whole body feels clear. Winter is something I’ve both loved and dreaded (S.A.D.) my whole life. But these days, on this melting planet, winter feels like a treasure always mine in such measure that I was heedless with it.

The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
to regard the frost and the boughs
of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
and have been cold a long time
to behold the junipers shagged with ice,
the spruces rough in the distant glitter
of the January sun; and not to think
of any misery in the sound of the wind,
in the sound of a few leaves,
which is the sound of the land
full of the same wind
that is blowing in the same bare place
for the listener, who listens in the snow,
and, nothing himself, beholds
nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.    


For more information about Wallace Stevens, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Kevin Hart

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Pete in first snow, 2011

This poem memorized itself into my body the first time I read it many years ago. Each time one of the lines drifts through my mind, like dark ice air through which we fall, all the sensations of snow settle over me. The particular, muffled quiet that only falling snow brings. The feeling of stillness and waiting. Numbness of cheeks and nose and fingers and toes after hours playing in it as a child. My dog, looking up and then around in wonder every year in the first snow. 

These days my heart aches when the poem comes to me, in a please let there still be a future with winter in it way. Please let the earth go dormant, please let that dark ice air return, please let the planet keep breathing. 

 

Snow, by Kevin Hart

Some days
the snow has taken me in
to know the time of snow, to live
inside a world so quiet

i​ts music
is all a shimmering. Some evenings
when quite alone
I turn off every light

and watch the snow
enjoy the dark, moving lushly
through spiky air,
finding more time

in time
than when I stretch myself
and am
my father’s father. Oh yes,

there is
a sparkling choir, there surely is,
and dark ice air
through which we fall.

 

​For more information on Kevin Hart, please ​click this link.

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Poem of the Week, by Patricia Fargnoli

Posted on by alisonmcghee

On December 4, 2010, I sent out the Patricia Fargnoli poem below. One of my writer friends, K, wrote back that it knocked her socks off. I wrote back that I agreed, and that in my ongoing efforts to become one with winter I had memorized it. I also wrote that I missed K and maybe we should collaborate on a book together.

K: A book together! My heart sings! Can it have a fox in it?
Me: I do believe we should have a fox in our book! A small orange flame streaking his way through the snow.
K: Maybe this poem should be the epigraph to our book!
Me: Yeah!

That was four and a half years ago, and we have been working on our novel –Maybe a Fox– all this time. At one point, about six months ago, K and I happened to be in the same city at the same time and we went out for drinks and dinner.

K, after one hefty margarita: You know what? This book nearly killed me.
Me, after the same hefty margarita: That makes two of us, sister.
K: If our friendship can survive the monumental struggle of writing this book together, it can survive anything.
Me: Agreed! A toast to us!

Then we ordered another round and toasted the fact that we both still love this poem, we both still love our monumental effort of a book, and we both still love each other. No small feats, any of  them.

Should the Fox Come Again to My Cabin in the Snow
– Patricia Fargnoli

Then, the winter will have fallen all in white
and the hill will be rising to the north,
the night also rising and leaving,
dawn light just coming in, the fire out.

Down the hill running will come that flame
among the dancing skeletons of the ash trees.
I will leave the door open for him.

 

For more information on Patricia Fargnoli, please click here.