“Poem of the Moment” on the Mass Poetry website today, October 2, 2014, is Sandra Kohler’s Snowblind. What fun she is having, and lucky us!
Sunday morning, snow. An icy snow, thick,
crystalline. I sit in a white-lit room, looking
through white lace curtains at the white-draped
houses and cars and trees of Tonawanda
Street. The only sound the scrape, rasp of one
shovel, one shoveller. What is the language
for this white light, cold state, this steady fall
of winter: prison, embrace, beauty, blindness?
The house is soundless. A distant roar – truck
or plow. The freight of Sunday papers waiting,
their sections worlds: imagination, arts, sport;
war, bombings, concentration camps, terror.
All architecture is the architecture of desire:
what’s built from our wishes, dark or aspiring.
In today’s news, a Vatican statesman calls
Gaza a concentration camp, to Israeli outrage:
their blind claim to the moral high ground.
Is the claim always a sign of blindness?
I condemn Israel for bombing Gaza, while on
the Boston streets where I live young men are
shooting each other and I close my eyes, hope
not to be in the line of fire or ricochet.
The wind chime on the porch slowly stirs,
as if moved not by wind, but from within.
Across the street, a shadow’s shadow: crow,
black marker, is perched on the crest of
Miss Rose’s slanted roof, defining the line
between the white of snow, the white
of sky. Morning’s clear light is blinding,
unsparing. There’s nothing left to spare.
Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music,(Word Press) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, winner of the 2002 Associated Writing Programs Award Series in Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including The New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many others over the past 35 years. A resident of Pennsylvania for most of her adult life, she moved to the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston in 2007.
