Light-Hearted
\nBy
\nJoseph Anthony Petro<\/p>\n
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Snow descends slowly and soft, like
\nSo many hours and days; drifting
\nAnd banking up against houses
\nAnd closed garage doors.<\/p>\n
And the silence with which it falls,
\nLulls us into thinking it will last forever.<\/p>\n
You go to sleep and the roads are clear.
\nYou wake and they\u2019ve turned into scrolls
\nUnfurling in a dazzling emptiness
\nAnd a blinding story you cannot make heads
\nOr tails of, and there\u2019s no way
\nTo even compose a coherent life or a song upon
\nSuch vast, frozen pages.<\/p>\n
So why rise at all? Why not
\nSink back into bed? Why get on
\nAll that gear and clear off the cars
\nAnd shovel the drive when there\u2019s no place to go?<\/p>\n
Truly I haven\u2019t a clue, except winter casts
\nA spell that draws us out of our warm
\nAnd familiar lives and into another world,
\nAnother planet called Wonder or Hush.
\nThere is white magic in the steadiness,
\nIn the hypnotic piling up of flat, geometric
\nPrisms\u2014each one different, infinitesimally small\u2014light\u2014
\nHearted and easily dissolved into the ground.<\/p>\n
And when we wake to the brilliance
\nOf such an elaborate, albeit cold opportunity,
\nOne in which we can freely choose to participate, or not;
\nOne in which we bring our own warmth
\nAnd sense of adventure, and we step out of our safe space
\nAnd into the holy silence, all geared up and as prepared as we can be,
\nAnd we trudge in the knee-high drifts until we find a place
\nOr until a place finds us, and we feel compelled to fall
\nAnd make an angel out of our lives; out of the one, geometric,
\nLight\u2014hearted life of who we really are.<\/p>\n
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