Kirsten Dierking: "Shoveling Snow"

If day after day I was caught inside
this muffle and hush

I would notice how birches
move with a lovely hum of spirits,

how falling snow is a privacy
warm as the space for sleeping,

how radiant snow is a dream
like leaving behind the body

and rising into that luminous place
where sometimes you meet

the people you've lost. How
silver branches scrawl their names

in tangled script against the white.
How the curves and cheekbones

of all my loved ones appear
in the polished marble of drifts.



"Shoveling Snow" by Kirsten Dierking. Text as published in Northern Oracle: Poems (Spout Press, 2007). Reprinted with permission.

Art credit: "Snow Drift," from a set of photographs of "nature's faces" by hvila (slightly altered by curator).