The sky is gray,
the trees dark shadows
twisting up from the ground.
The fields are blanketed in the
dry
refuse of last year’s harvest.
The nymphs are departed.
The land stretches empty and
flat
into the horizon against which I
see clearly
the silhouette of a far-away
pine tree;
standing on this road, I may
know
that I am the only soul outside
in the cold for miles around.
Trees mark only farmsteads or
streams,
follow wandering creeks like thread
through dead fields,
or stand shoulder to shoulder
as soldiers against the wind.
Everything we built is falling
down.
Why did we ever come here?
Next to barely inhabited houses
barns built a hundred years ago
collapse, the weight of time and
snow
too much to hold.
The paint is faded, the corners
dulled,
the landscape fated for the
sweet amnesia
of snow.
I considered both "shoulder to shoulder / as soldiers against the wind" and "shoulder to shoulder / in hollow armies against the wind." The first has that nice internal rhyme within the simile, which is why I chose it, but "armies against" is alliterative, and a bit more subtle. "Hollow soldiers" is also an option, which wouldn't have much literal meaning, but would be another T. S. Eliot allusion and might to tonal work. Votes?
I used snow twice at the end. The last three lines ground the poem in time by assuming the inevitability of winter. At the moment, the title does this as well. Without that, though, this wastelandish state is allowed to exist indefinitely. I half feel like the ending is a cop-out right now. I'm not sure the last three lines match the rest of the poem, but I also don't have a different ending in mind. Regardless, the first snow is not snow that actually exists, whereas the second snow is. Is that a problem? What are your intuitions toward the ending? Do you have thoughts on other things that could be done?
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