Waiting for Snow
The afternoon sky turned silver
then, as the day wore itself out,
pewter gray.
Like a pleading child,
it had given up resisting
and settled in.
As night drew curtains
against the sleeping world
the first flakes fell.
I saw them through the panes,
slow at first, as though uncertain
where they would land, but always
down. Down to the tops of bare trees
or caught in needles of evergreens,
blanketing everything white.
I knew it was time for snowing,
not only because it was winter,
but because we were all overwrought
by shouting and shootings at schools
and on streets, too close,
and too terrifying.
We needed the muffling, the silence,
the waiting for snow.
Linda Stewart Henley is an English-born American who moved to the United States with her family when she was sixteen. She is the author of three award-winning novels: Estelle, Waterbury Winter, and Kate’s War. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.
