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Spring Snow

By Arthur Sze

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad;

it is how you nail a tin amulet ear
into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are
possessed by the idea of possession,

we can never lose to recover what is ours.
Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed
to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof,

but mind opens to the smell of lightening.
Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat;
in memory people outline bodies on walls.

Arthur Sze, "Spring Snow" from The Redshifting Web: Poems. Copyright © 1998 by Arthur Sze. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Poet Bio

Black and white portrait of poet Arthur Sze

A second-generation Chinese American born in New York City, Arthur Sze teaches in New Mexico at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is remarkable for its combined focus of Eastern history and Western modernity.

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More Poems About Nature

A Desert Memory

By Bertrand N. O. Walker

Lonely, open, vast and free,
The dark'ning desert lies;
The wind sweeps o'er it fiercely,
And the yellow sand flies.
The tortuous trail is hidden,
Ere the sand-storm has passed
With all its wild, mad shriekings,
Borne shrilly on its blast.

 

Are they fiends or are they demons
That wail weirdly as they go,
Those hoarse and dismal cadences,
From out their depths of woe?
Will they linger and enfold
The lone trav'ler in their spell,

 

Weave ‘round him incantations,
Brewed and bro't forth from their hell?
Bewilder him and turn him
From the rugged, hidden trail,
Make him wander far and falter,
And trembling quail
At the desert and the loneliness
So fearful and so grim,
That to his fervid fancy,
Wraps in darkness only him?

 

The wind has spent its fierce wild wail,
         The dark storm-pall has shifted,
Forth on his sight the stars gleam pale
         In the purpling haze uplifted.

 

And down the steep trail, as he lists,
         He hears soft music stealing;
It trembling falls through filmy mists,
         From rock-walls faint echoes pealing.

 

Whence comes this mystic night-song
With its rhythm wild and free,
With is pleading and entreaty
Pouring forth upon the sea
Of darkness, vast and silent,
Like a tiny ray of hope
That oft-times comes to comfort
When in sorrow's depths we grope?

 

'Tis the An-gu, the Kat-ci-na,
'Tis the Hopi's song of prayer,

 

That in darkness wards off danger,
When 'tis breathed in the air;
Over desert, butte, and mesa,
It is borne out on the night,
Dispelling fear and danger,
Driving evil swift a-flight.

  • Nature
  • Religion
  • Activities
  • Mythology & Folklore

Whose Mouth Do I Speak With

By Suzanne S. Rancourt

I can remember my father bringing home spruce gum.
He worked in the woods and filled his pockets
with golden chunks of pitch.
For his children
he provided this special sacrament
and we’d gather at this feet, around his legs,
bumping his lunchbox, and his empty thermos rattled inside.
Our skin would stick to Daddy's gluey clothing
and we’d smell like Mumma's Pine Sol.
We had no money for store bought gum
but that’s all right.
The spruce gum
was so close to chewing amber
as though in our mouths we held the eyes of Coyote
and how many other children had fathers
that placed on their innocent, anxious tongue
the blood of tree?

  • Nature
  • Living
  • Relationships