How an Ice Age Starts - Jan 16 2026

 

How an Ice Age Starts

Jan 16 2026

It snowed again.

Not a blizzard

just a gentle sprinkling

that never seems to stop,

painting over the tired stuff

with a fresh white coat.

It seems relentless, day after day;

like the slow drip

that wears away rock,

and how an ice age starts

 — imperceptibly,

until we’re looking up at a sliver of sky

between walls of snow and ice.

I console myself

it isn’t hail or rain or sudden thaw,

a flash flood on frozen ground.

Just a postcard, snow-globe, or Christmas card,

a Rockwell painting of wintertime

too sentimental to call “art”.

Where the lawns and roads are a wonderland,

trees bejewelled in white,

and well-scrubbed kids

with ruddy-cheeks

frolic in the snow;

1950s kids

who will never grew old

feel the cold

or forget their winter tires.

I pause

rest my hands on the shovel

and look up at the sky,

imploring the weather gods

for relief.

Or at least 

a brief interregnum of rest.

But the gods are impervious, impulsive, capricious,

and weather

too fickle to predict.

So we learn to be fatalists,

wearily accepting

and making the best of things;

shovelling out the driveway

and plunging through the drifts,

gathering round the fire

and calling in sick.

And when it’s good packing snow

just being kids;

dropping onto our backs

and flapping our arms and legs,

wet snow down our necks;

making angels

that will take an act of faith

to last at least a day

in this winter of discontent.

If Rockwell is too sentimental to be regarded as more than a good illustrator by critics who can’t paint, then I guess this piece is too sentimental to call poetry.

(Or at least the stuff the gatekeepers of modern poetry — the critics, academics, and poetry editors (that is, of the few remaining outlets that actually still publish poetry) —  deem worthy, which I find (beware, here comes the rant) too intellectual to affect me, too discordant to pleasurably recite, and so frequently confessional that it strikes me more as self-indulgent therapy than relatable.  Frankly, I find a lot of the poetry I encounter in publications such as the New Yorker and Atlantic incoherent word salad that just makes my head hurt.)

But it does feel like a slow drip so far this winter. No sooner do I finish shovelling than more comes. The forecasts are unreliable; the high pressure systems of cold air and clear skies don’t persist like they used to. 

It is beautiful, though. The graceful boughs of the evergreens bejewelled in snow; the starry sky on clear nights, like sharp points of light against the black; and the flowing contours of snow that soften the countryside, concealing its sins and blemishes.