To Mark a May Snowstorm in Missouri

Nature's Cuneiform: Bird Tracks and Gravel in Snow

The last time

 it snowed in May

in northern Missouri

was in 1907.

Snow fell abundantly

on Brookfield, Missouri

on May 3, 2013.

Reading by Intaglio

James Hart

Some words are easily read

in the world’s curt cuneiform

like bird tracks in the snow,

or the faint scrawlings of a worm

showing my bones where I’ll go

as well as alphabets of lead.

Such words mean no harm,

nor do I read them so—

not even ink knows it’s dead

yet educating in the page’s glow,

nor names know upon a tablet’s bed

they teach us by a rigid Roman form.

This is language of the long ago

if we discern lessons of the dead

are as mute as Grecian marble herms

incised by time’s letters uncorrupted,

muddied scribbles of random worms

no more valedictory than tiny y’s in snow.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Bird Cuneiform: "...tiny y's in snow"