Time is Snow

Time is Snow

I long for the gentle grace of falling snow
and how it wipes this world clean
hiding everything away under white sheets,
silent again in stillness, untouched and calm
like a room no-one enters.

I walk through the crisping whiteness, leaving tracks,
a mapping of memory,
of routes taken, revealing decisions made.
A chart of all explored possibilities,
new worlds discovered and claimed.

Children are always off in the cold distance
where the snow becomes a tool
material for shaping forms in gloved hands.
Taking what is found and used for purposes
enough to build a white world.

This is the snow of our lives, heaped around us
at the side of roads and paths.
A disturbance to our smooth efficient world
pushed aside in hasty piles from our driveways,
so we can be somewhere else.

All our creations are snow, melting in time.
All our lives are snow, thawing
and draining back into thick swollen rivers
tumbling down to that endless eternal sea.
Time is snow. There, and then gone.