Winter 2026 by Marjorie Maddox

Winter 2026

The snow. All morning
I’ve been shoveling it:

stab, scoop, lift, hurl,
almost the same motion

as digging a plot deep
and wide enough

for a country,
but not quite,

almost strenuous enough,
breath-stuck-in-the-frigid-air-

enough for the ultimate
attack on 350 million hearts

and their owners trying
to stab, scoop, lift, hurl

some kind of sense into
the brittle air. Now

the side of the driveway
has white walls two feet high,

but the path to the house—
a word no longer characterized

anywhere as safe—
remains a sheet of ice,

the less dangerous kind,
but still lethal. Nothing

here is anything
like okay. Stab, scoop,

lift, hurl. Get out
but don’t turn your back,

don’t put the car
in reverse. It is almost

the same motion. Who’s to say
how a movement

is interpreted
in the cold?

*

WPSU-FM Poetry Moment host, Presence assistant editor, and Professor Emerita at Commonwealth U, Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry—most recently Hover Here—a story collection, 5 children’s books, and two anthologies. Her middle-grade biography is A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball’s Great Experiment. marjoriemaddox.com