Snow, Delicate and Dangerous

For Advent 2024, I had the opportunity to write some poetry about the Christian practice of reflecting on the birth of Jesus, on recognizing the darkness of the night yet preparing for the coming dawn. These themes resonated deeply in me – images of darkness and light, of past and future – and one poem quickly turned into a sequence of three intertwining pieces, which am collectively calling Come the Dawn.

Over the next few weeks I'll be publishing each of these poems, along with a short reflection on what they mean to me. The poem here, "Snow, Delicate and Dangerous," is the first of the collection. If you missed the first one, you can read "A Shift, A Turn" here.

Snow
Falls silent, soft.

I catch a petal upon my finger
And gone,
Then another and another,
The song
Of the snow, a dance.
It gathers
At my toes, around my shoes
I kick
Flurries of white and
It grows.

Snow
Falls silent, strong.

The path behind is lost,
These flakes
Become a storm, a veil,
A fear,
Cold and dark surrounding.
Its grip
On the world is
Its grip
On me and I am
Unknown.

Snow
Falls heavy, strong.

I spin all around desperate
To find
A way to escape the drift of
The cold
Rooting deep inside my bones.
The road
Is not there, is not there,
So I cry
Echoes across this bed of snow
In midnight.

Snow
Lies heavy, strong.

In the desperate quiet I hear,
So soft,
A delicate pull of my heart,
A choice
To move, to walk along the Way.
Tomorrow
Is not inevitable, it is chosen,
Created —
Illumine every step I take
Today.

Light
Lies heavy, strong.

About This Poem

In this poem I tell the story of a journey, thematically a reflection on the connection between obstacles as an external force and the perception of those obstacles as an internal one. The snow begins soft and beautiful, a wondrous experience of nature, but as the snow builds in power, it transforms into a dangerous, oppressive enemy. For the Speaker, wonder is replaced by a tightening sense of anxiety building into fearful desperation as they stand frozen in the storm. It is only when they choose to move, to walk, to push through the snow that they see the light of tomorrow, a new day.

As the middle poem of of the collection, this one does not have a true resolution. The final stanza continues to look ahead to light, to warmth on the horizon, but it remains distant. They are still in the storm, reaching for strength to weather it.

In its structure, this poem alternates between stanzas of two lines and stanzas of ten lines, reflecting the push and pull of internal and external forces. The story is told in the longer stanzas, but the short stanzas reinforce the broader narrative by shifting the perception of the world a single word at a time, tiny, almost imperceptible steps along the journey.

One of the things I really enjoyed about creating this series is that each poem is written to be read aloud. In some of my earlier work I've played with expanding the meaning of the words themselves by using the visual shape/structure of the text, but I haven't done much with the actual sounds of the words since high school, when I was trying to write lyrics for Christian rock songs. In this series, since they were written for verbal performance, I tried to capture rhythms and repetition that reinforced their themes or enhanced the stories I wanted to tell, and I hope that comes through when you read it aloud.