| Onion Snow
.......For Marjan
They spoke of the barbarity of the weather,
unpredictable, like a beast:
the caress of early spring,
the hiss of late snow,
onion snow,
having come from climes
where, in memory,
the weather, part of an ordered world,
could be read like Bible letters,
and they were reassured.
Here, they remembered millennial floods,
God's whales, signs, washing up on beaches,
but nothing like wild onion's green spears
jutting up through snow,
nothing like the displacements
of this clime.
Imagining them,
thinking of the weather
on this cruel coast,
I wonder at the cost
of expatriation,
wonder how they watched
their children grow
in the only clime they would know,
how the children would play
at home
in onion snow. |
|
- Mathew Wilson teaches creative writing at Penn State
Harrisburg. He has completed an (as yet) unpublished volume, entitled A Choice of
Exiles.
- Beauty for Ashes Poetry Review ©1996-2000
- ©A Creative Ash Publication 2000
- Isaiah 61:1-3
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