POEMS/ Winter Midnight in the Village

This poem was born after a heavy snowfall in Farmington, CT where we lived for twenty years. To ski through the town when there was no traffic at all was a mystical experience.  I will never forget it.

Winter Midnight in the Village

Before the plows can come to spoil it all,
we don our skis, put on our warmest gloves,
collect the dogs, and make our way along the empty streets.

Time hangs suspended. The dogs are strangely still.
The old, historic houses, fenced and fortified
by piled up drifts of new blown snow,

stand alert and watching as we go softly by,
their clapboard sides, their aged, hoary,
weathered faces luminescent in the quiet cold.

A few lights flicker in communion from the shuttered
windows as we glide behind the village school; by the
steepled church, we think we hear the sounds of voices

in the darkened hall. The muted street lights veiled
by falling snow, the giant beeches decked in
winter white, the narrow snow-bound lanes

conspire together to form their world anew,
as if they were a council of wise New England elders
holding a midnight meeting to take their village back.

Winter Midnight in the Village appears in All Roads Go Where They Will (Antrim House, 2010)

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