Snow in February (again)

There's been snow today in the ancestral homeland. (Well, OK, my ancestral homelands are actually northwest Ireland and central Germany, but.... I grew up on the South Wales border, where I am now.) Not anywhere near the 6 or 7 inches that was threatened, but enough to keep the kids off school. And the sky is still woolly with more....

Snow at this time of year seems to be becoming a regular event for me, wherever in the world I may be: this year, Wales; two years ago, DC; last year, the Unnameable City where I mostly reside these days (a surprise last gasp of arctic chill after what had been for the most part an uncommonly mild winter).

One of these unexpected snow flurries last year came in on a Saturday afternoon, blown onwards by such a violent wind out of the northwest (and then trapped in the cul-de-sac of my U-shaped apartment complex) that when it hit the back wall of my apartment, it started flying upwards. Really. Not just swirling and hovering about a bit in the eddies. Positively zooming vertically skywards.

This striking phenomenon inspired one of my 'instant' poems - composed in only minutes or seconds, faster than I could write it down. This doesn't happen to me all that often; but I do find that these are generally the good ones. A year on, I find I still rather like this. Of course, it had particular resonance for me then because I was still painfully recovering from one of the great romantic traumas of my life..... and a whole raft of other upheavals too - work, money, friends - most of them self-inflicted problems, a cycle of craziness that had begun at the end of the preceding October.

Maybe it has particular resonance again now because, in many ways, the last 4 months have again been more 'challenging' than I would have wished....

Well, anyway, here's the poem.

Snow Fantasy

Outside my window the snow
Is falling upwards,
As though Gravity had given up
Or Time were running backwards.

Four months ago I stepped off a high cliff.
How I wish that I could switch off Gravity
Or reverse the flow of Time,
Reclaim those four months of freefall....
Follow the snow home.