Snow Thoughts and Sunday Thoughts

Every day I wake up and I look out the window and I hope that it has snowed. But it never has. Super lame.

Also last night I couldn't sleep at all so I read this lovely collection of poems by Louise Gluck. I'm not very smart and I don't know exactly what's meant to be happening in all these poems, but it was going through the cycle of the year and some of them were from the perspective of various flowers, others were from the perspectives of various natural elements/God, and others prayers, either Matins or Vespers. A lot of the poems that I liked the most seemed to be from a human perspective questioning God's apparent silence; the cycle ended with humans learning from darkness and silence and growing into a rebirth. It was really cool, and important to me because this is something I feel like I have a hard time with, since it seems like God is so often silent. Anyway, here's a poem from the beginning of the cycle that I really liked, and here's one from the end.

Matins
Unreachable father, when we were first
exiled from heaven, you made
a replica, a place in one sense
different from heaven, being
designed to teach a lesson: otherwise
the same--beauty on other side, beauty
without alternative--Except
we didn't know what was the lesson. Left alone,
we exhausted each other. Years
of darkness followed; we took turns
working the garden, the first tears
filling our eyes as earth
misted with petals, some
dark red, some flesh colored--
We never thought of you
whom we were learning to worship.
We merely knew it wasn't human nature to love
only what returns love.

The White Lilies
As a man and woman make
a garden between them like
a bed of stars, here
they linger in the summer evening
and the evening turns
cold with their terror; it
could all end, it is capable
of devastation. All, all
can be lost, through scented air
the narrow columns
uselessly rising, and beyond,
a churning sea of poppies--

Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor.