Snow-Loss Cliff (news as prompt)

We finally have snow in Kentucky. It may only be three inches of fluffy white, but that’s triple our total for the whole of last winter. My children are elated! They haven’t had to go anywhere at all for four days (our hilly, curvy, bordering-a-cliff country road is always the last to see a plow). Their existence has revolved around snowball fights, hot chocolate, Legos, and Minecraft. It’s been lovely . . . and I’ll be elated if by some miracle I get to send my darlings off to school tomorrow.

My poem this week has two inspirations—our first snowfall in over a year and this article in The Atlantic - “The Threshold At Which Snow Starts Irreversibly Disappearing.” Similar articles appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and (I suspect) many other outlets, all in response to a recent study published in Nature.

Maybe you can already venture a guess at the prompt for today?

Photo by Tord Sollie on Unsplash

The Prompt

Read the news. Or watch it. Or listen to NPR. Or if the thought of any of those activities sends your nervous system cartwheeling into fight or flight, then engage with some other form of media, like maybe Substack or a magazine or cat videos. Notice the thoughts that arise as you read/listen/watch/absorb. Notice your emotions and physical sensations. Let the realities of what you’re taking in swirl together with the realities of your own life. What poem wants to emerge from that swirling?

The Poem

Here’s the poem that emerged for me.

Snow-Loss Cliff

The first snow falls
like a hush.
Like a puff of breath
against a pointed finger,
falling
frozen
to the ground. 

The last snow,
over a year ago,
was little more
than dust. 
A thin, white coat
that sun and wind
quickly stripped from our
grasping mittens
and angel arms. 

There is a cliff ahead, and 
we are skiing out of bounds. 

My dad skied off a cliff once,
50 feet of free fall into
bottomless snowpack.
He thought he was fine, and it was
almost true. Only later,
with the melting of time,
did they find the break in his neck and the
hole in his brain. 
“Like a donut,” he jokes. Like it’s
sort of delicious.
Maybe even worth it
for the laughter
at cocktail parties.

There are holes in our logic.
I feel the hydrologists
pointing their fingers. 
You want to change
by degrees, they say,
but you must change
exponentially.  

I wonder what we will lose 
when the bottom drops out. 
When we enter free fall and find
nothing 
for our
arms
to flap
against. 

I wonder what precipice
we must reach
before we agree:

this is more
than party banter.  

Thank you for reading, lovelies! I am looking forward to reading your poems and reflections in the comments thread!