A Grammar for Snow
I who have yearned a lifetime
to learn their names
like a discoverer in a foreign land.
Blizzard and squalls, bands
flurries, grains of graupel
in soft hail or pellets.
Plants also: Snow peas,
snow belles and poppies.
Snowdrops, bowing
in sweet pairs, like necks
of white cranes. Blossoms
that poke through frost
on a March day when
when no one is looking
and then break your heart
again when false-spring
recants on its promise
like early love that swore
to be faithful forever.
Watermelon snow; pink
then red. Blood snow,
they call it in the Sierras.
A snow that lingers, holds
on, winter to winter,
year after year, longer
than we thought we
ever would, when
first we learned
the correct syntax,
and now struggling
to keep our own special
order like that winter
when we began to love.
Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature and a semi-finalist for the Emily Dickinson Society Award. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States (including Broadkill Review) and internationally in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Two of his poems were recently anthologized in Ten Years of Dos Madres Press.