This blew me away this morning, again from the Almanac:
The White
by Patricia Hampl
These are the moments
before snow, whole weeks before.
The rehearsals of milky November,
cloud constructions
when a warm day
lowers a drift of light
through the leafless angles
of the trees lining the streets.
Green is gone,
gold is gone.
The blue sky is
the clairvoyance of snow.
There is night
and a moon
but these facts
force the hand of the season:
from that black sky
the real and cold white
will begin to emerge.
"The White" by Patricia Hampl, from Resort. © Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1983. From The Writer's Almanac for November 12, 2011.
It is cold here, all the leaves are down, but the sun is shining and the sky is blue. The last two nights the sky has been clear, the moon full. Ms. Hampl just described my world and noted for me the sad foreboding reality that we are in our last "nice" days of the year: winter is coming.
Anyway, great poem.
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous - why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
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