February 2024
Author's Note: Greetings to all Verse Virtual people! As I write this note, it has started snowing-- again. I've therefore chosen to avoid talking about myself here (all pertinent info about me can be found on my website, www.mltpoet.com). Instead, I offer you a pair of poems about winter. One takes a fairly positive view of the season, and the other a more realistic approach to it. Stay indoors as you read them.
No Two Exactly Alike
Why have you closed yourself upstairs for hours
tending to a poem on this icy-moist, keen
April day? You and I could be outdoors
walking the woods, our boots leaving wet green
stains between the violets and paper-whites
still buried to their chins in snow—but no,
you’ve drifted up the stairs again to write
down still another simile for snow.
Can’t Keep Warm Anyway
so maybe I’ll just live outside all winter.
Feel my way along the roots of a tall
jack pine, find a soft spot on the splintered
mold-stained tarpaulin of fall.
I’ll re-arrange those few pathetic seeds
still wrinkling side by side in blackened pods,
then listen to the skeletons of weeds
clacking their indignation to the gods.
I’ll figure out what happened to the primrose
that’s neither prim nor rose these days, but dried
and splitting, leaking seeds on purpose
so wind and birds can take them for a ride.
I’ll note the way the coneflowers have found
a whole new way to bloom: using their heads
for trapping flakes before they hit the ground
and sporting them like nightcaps in their beds.
You’ll find me with my coat around my torso,
contemplating sparrows—dull, brown
and shivering like them, but even more so
when the puny little sun goes down.
©2024 Marilyn Taylor
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL