Editor's note: We're actually in for some good old-fashioned Minnesota January cold this weekend, and we've had a fairly decent snow cover this year, but the trend has been toward warmer and drier winters in these parts. Here's a poem I wrote a couple of years ago about the changes I've observed in Minnesota winters since we moved here in 1990.
Seasonal Affective Disorder
How few poems I’ve written during the Bush years!
I’ve sat out the mild winters in silence,
distrustful of the early springs, the shock and awe
of summer days invading March.
I suppose I should have said something sooner,
but I would have felt like such a grump
complaining about the January shirt-sleeve weather—
like the gloom-eyed groundhog making
his discredited case for six more weeks of winter.
That’s the problem with liberals like me—
we live in cold states, under gray flaking clouds,
and so we start to think in shades of gray.
Maybe we should lighten up, enjoy the early spring.
I was never planning to visit a glacier anyway.
Then why do I miss so much those light
April snows of the Clinton years, white on green
like a Wellstone lawn sign, the waffling season
of winter in the morning, spring in the afternoon?
2 comments:
Rocking good political references!
You could have even called it "Seasonal Elective Disorder" or "Treasonal Affective Disorder" to hammer it home, but no point in knocking the reader unconscious. That's not the Poet Way.
Funny stuff. Thanks, Rob.
Great poem! I love it. I'm going to link to it so that my vast audience can read your excellent stuff.
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