THE POETRY OF ICE AND SNOW


lovers paris
Lately I’ve been re-reading TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, surely one of the finest works of the 20th century, and started looking at some blogs that include original poetry. Here’s a sampling of some poetry I’ve found that I especially like. I realize this is a hugely subjective assessment, so I’ve included a snippet from the work of each poet to tease you, and a link to where you can find more. The theme of all these excerpts, perhaps because this endless winter is getting to me, is Ice and Snow. These are in no particular order:

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Roger Moore:

I hold up shorn stumps of flowers for the night wind to heal as a chickadee chants an afterlife built of spring branches. Pressed between the pages of my dream: a lingering scent; the death of last year’s delphiniums; the tall tree toppled in the yard; a crab apple flower; a shard of grass as brittle as a bitter tongue at winter’s end.

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Carlos Arribas:

Limestone (notes):

History clings to your pallid fists. Or myth.
Mosses cower in your cold cupped hands.

Mane of cedars.

Catcher of sea salts blown on the wind.
Lost sailors’ white geisha.
Stairway to lichens and gods.

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Antonio Savoradin:

Now that the memory slips away
whole into its own country
where the swells break into stillness
and the black hour shadows out of its mouth
an icy spectacle of water banking its lightless flow
this child floating and his dead laughter
echo through darkness anchored in paradise

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Judith Meskill’s Haitech Haiku:

through myths and shadows
footsteps of the archetypes
fade in windblown snow

pulsar wind bow shock
supersonic geminga
night-light diffusion

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Kara at SpaceTramp:

January: gentle snow flakes fall – salute the New Year. A soft surface of white covers the field. Big Ben flakes spiral before they settle in my hair. I slip on my rubbers – rigid and black. The old orchard is barely visible. Tree branches bow with the weight of snow – some collapse. Wrenched from the mother tree, leaving gaps of corpse white wood. A frenzy of birds appear at the feeder, unaccustomed to this white phenomenon. They crowd and peck, losing themselves in the pursuit of food. A lone woodpecker gnaws a nearby tree.

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Dana Pattillo:

THE PARK FIRS

I have seen you dressed in the deep ermine
snow of midwinter, elder brothersó

The tryst-keeping of your vanishing
and mine
mind different clocks,
but trace arcs of the same pendulumó

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The photo of the Seine River in Paris, above, is by Sam Javanrouh from his wonderful photoblog Daily Dose of Imagery. Some of my own poetry can be found here.

And here are a few Ice & Snow lines from Eliot,:

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
Whem the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

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6 Responses to THE POETRY OF ICE AND SNOW

  1. kara says:

    Thanks Dave for posting one of my poems – I am flattered… prose poetry is not often recognized. And Hey, nice collection of links to peruse!

  2. meg says:

    See, I love that, Dave….you totally make the blog-world a better place when you connect your own art to another’s…

  3. Dr. Omed says:

    Thank you very kindly for including one of mine; see my latest post.

  4. Stu Savory says:

    Definitely not your style Dave, but I’ll point you to one of mine written in 1965:-http://home.egge.net/~savory/poem_59.gifStu

  5. Dave Pollard says:

    Thank you, everyone, you’ve made my day — and Dr.O, the poem by Stevens is wonderful — I’m going to have to read more of his stuff.

  6. judith says:

    thanks so much dave… i am honored… (-:=

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