Humanist Voices in Verse: The Year Without Snow

This week’s poem is by Daniel Thomas Moran, the poetry editor for Humanist Network News.

Daniel Thomas Moran served as Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, New York from 2005 to 2007. His work has appeared in The New York Times, National Forum, and the Poetry Salzburg Review. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Boston University’s School of Dental Medicine. His website is www.danielthomasmoran.net.

If you’d like to contribute original poetry to Humanist Voices in Verse, write to hnn@americanhumanist.org with “Poetry” in the subject line. Please send no more than three poems for consideration per week.

 

February Nineteenth, in the Year without Snow

 For Dennis and Lynda Crawford

Here, within the breast of February,
the sun is alighting and large, blinding
as it slips to a place the hill conceals.

But the ground is dressed
in cloaks of browned leaves,
relinquished in the long past Fall.
The Warner River is easing,
free of late Winter ice.

This will be the year
we will recall, when we awaited
the snows that did not come,
The sky a bottomless blue.

When the cold was
not our cold at all,
The earth dispossessed of sleep.

This will be the year
we believed we could hear
the daffodils, wondering among themselves,
Is it time? Is it time, now?

— 2012 Daniel Thomas Moran