Snowfall
for my mother
Some time in the dark hours
it seemed I was a spark climbing
the black road
with my death helping me up
like a brother
growing
but this morning
I see that the silent kin I loved as a child
have arrived all together in the night
from the old country
they remembered
and everything remembers
I eat from the hands
of what for years have been junipers
the taste as not changed
I am beginning
again
but a bell rings in some village I do not know
and cannot hear
and in the sunlight snow drops from branches
leaving its name in the air
and a single footprint
brother
— W.S. Merwin, from The Carrier of Ladders (1970) and Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005)
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Snow on Juniper Berries photo used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-NC 2.0)