Counting snowflakes will not help me sleep
Counting snowflakes will not help me sleep
-for the fallen, and those yet to fall in the Israel-Hamas conflict
Bring me slow horses
and hot cocoa. Give me
the God of twenty-seven degrees.
God of snow. God of rock
salt shining on the road home.
Take this detonating dream –
a beautiful woman watches
David bathing on a roof.
She will have him.
She’ll take his house,
his dark figs harvested by hand.
She says, your babies
are bad at war.
She never blinks.
He sings in his mother’s
tongue. He tries to tell me
something as he drowns.
When I wake, the old
language is lost. I wait
at the window – the fallen
belong to us all. I couldn’t
count them if I tried.
Look – the snow
is really coming down.
About this poem
I wrote this poem because I can't look away from the staggering violence on the world stage. Even people we will never meet belong to us, and we to them, in a shared human experience.
Written on January 15, 2024
Submitted by stacey.forbes on February 04, 2024
- 44 sec read
- 49 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XA BCDXX XBX XXX DXX XCX XXXAX XX |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 724 |
Words | 149 |
Stanzas | 8 |
Stanza Lengths | 2, 5, 3, 3, 3, 3, 5, 2 |
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"Counting snowflakes will not help me sleep" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 13 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/182635/counting-snowflakes-will-not-help-me-sleep>.
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