Well…we might as well get ready…snow will fall – winter will arrive. Poet Vivian Shipley sent this poem to the LYRICAL. Shipley is the editor of the award-winning Connecticut Review, and the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor at Southern Connecticut State University. I met her some years ago at a reading sponsored by the New England Poetry Club and we have stayed in touch.

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Snow

This weather could make me manic.
Light, thin as an invalid’s broth,
is rationed out to be sipped as if there
were no hunger for forsythia gnawing me.
No willow with iced dreadlocks, I’m
like an old fir that will snap after bending
too long. Awake, I suspect there must be
a metaphor buried out there. White birch
with Shelley’s promise budding their limbs
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
are not enough to see me through February.
I can quote poetry, but I don’t have a degree
from Yale. With a diploma in my hand
I could have joined Mory’s, been an old blue
like my Christmas spruce. Evergreen,
I might have seen this storm coming
and hunkered down, all backbone. Instead,
I need a jug of Kentucky moonshine,
white lightning to jolt my bones, to jazz
the junipers that have stayed stooped
for months. Their curved backs spell April
pruning, or even uprooting if I’m not sober.

– Vivian Shipley

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