Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.
Michael Simms: Snow
falls from the bright sky. A black dog digs through the drifts, finds a frozen egg and swallows it whole. Suddenly I’m awake walking noticing the porches ragged with ice, the Aurelian harp too heavy for the wind to move. The neighbor’s red truck with its cargo of snow. A pile of cinder stones waiting for the trench to be dug. Three men warming their hands before an oil drum trash fire turn their faces toward us. As if by accident, we’ve arrived at the house of the half-chewed ball. The house the ball the memory white in the white air. The house like a book with the cover torn off. Behind the upstairs window, an empty bed where a boy lay tossing with fever, his mother absent from the chair where she sat beside him for months, but now the black dog he loved is rolling in the snow with great joy.
falls on the steeple of St. Mary’s, clings to bare branches of the sycamore and coats the roofs of tall narrow houses of plumbers and waitresses. Flakes tick against the glass where the Southside High Homecoming Queen of 1958 now an old woman sits at her kitchen table sipping coffee remembering the smell of bacon frying in her mother’s kitchen, her father sitting alone in his underwear having stripped off his blackened clothes and leaving them on the back porch, white skin of his legs, black dust on his face belonging to two different men. And behind the house his clean white shirts frozen in the air.
Michael Simms is the founding editor of Vox Populi. His collections of poems include American Ash (Ragged Sky, 2020)
Copyright 2024 Michael Simms
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I love the contrast between snow and coal dust, and the meditation of frozen time, and the landing on white shirts.
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Thanks, Pascale!
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lovely…and heartbreaking. (almost wrote heart braking…that too).
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Thanks, Kathleen. I like the metaphor heart braking. Some poems do make us catch our breath and skip a heartbeat.
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Oh, Michael! I know that “harp too heavy for the wind to move.” Most days, I can’t even pick it up! You’re a wonder.
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Louise, YOU are the wonder.
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Mike, what an amazing, stirring, heart-breaking piece of prose! Cliché though it be, ‘ll say it reads like poetry, so much brought home by implication. One of the best things by your had I’ve seen… and that’s saying something!
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by your HAND, I meant
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Thank you, Syd. Both of these pieces were written a few years ago at different times. I didn’t know whether they worked, but people seem to like them, so I guess they sort of do.
Anyway, I’m grateful for your attention to VP.
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Evocative and moving.
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Thanks, Robbi!
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So vivid Michael. Really moving. (Carla Schwartz)
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Thanks, Carla!
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