Snow Fantasy

Snow is piling on the ground

a centimeter per second.

I didn’t know dirt could freeze,

but it has.

Massachusetts thinks we are still in the Ice Age.

Snow was created to be a barrier

to keep people from crowding into California.

Its white blankness was meant to erase

the memory of green.

It has failed.

There is no snow under the shade of redwood trees

on a ten-mile path through a canyon of ferns

with a creek of pure water disturbed only by falling needles.

California is a real place –

I did not make it up.

No child of my winterbound brain could be so temperate.

Sunlit days in fields of tall grasses

where horses run toward the sea:

A patterned veil of sunlight falls on the forest floor

where in Massachusetts would fall doilies of snow:

s’no fantasy.

This poem is part of the collection Dusk Before Dawn: Poems. More info: https://www.jessicaknauss.com/dusk-before-dawn-poems/