Snow in my neighborhood.
An homage to Lou Rawls and to the St. Louis poet who became a Brit.
February is the cruelest month.
Where did T.S. Eliot get that April business?
February is the cruelest month, breeding
Black ice boulders out of the dead streets, mixing
Memory and desire, the memory of light,
The longing for sun, at least more of it every day.
February is the cruelest month, building
Slippy slides on the sidewalks, lurking
In wait for me to land flat
On my butt, if I’m lucky.
January also is cruel, refusing
To share its light with those who wake in the dark
And work through the rare hours of sunshine.
Assuming there is any anyway.
My original copy of
The Wasteland from senior lit class at Mizzou.
Sometimes winter keeps us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life for spring.
What branches grow
Out of this icy rubbish? We do know
There is life to come under this ugly blackness.
I will show you how winter can be beautiful
If only the ice would melt
And we could walk happily again
On dry sidewalks, even if the temp is single digits
With a wind chill below zero.
While the Hawk blows off the lake, sending
Me on to a dead end street
Where there is nothing to stop the wind.
So they put ropes on some of the buildings to help
Us get around the corners.
February is still the cruelest month.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold because she didn’t get a flu shot
Despite being the wisest woman in the Midwest.
Here, said she, is your card. The frozen Phoenician sailor
Who should have known better than to go out without
Boots, hat, earmuffs, mittens and down.
Those are shells that were his ears. Look!
Now frozen to pink marble.
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks
I could have told her not to swim off the rocks
At Addison, when chunks of ice cover
What was once and will be again
Our beautiful blue lake.
February is the cruelest month, even if, as I,
You love winter.
Just not quite as much of it.
Photos by the author.
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T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land And Other Poems
, (1930, Harcourt Brace and Company, Inc.)
Lou Rawls, "Dead End Street Monolog" from Lou Rawls at the Century Plaza (Live)
(1973)
And Donald Justice, my senior year English professor at the University of Missouri, who taught me to love modern poetry and especially T.S. Eliot. 