Winter Storm Jonas

Wake up, Odalis, wake up -

They're here, the snow flakes
in clusters, like unstemmed
cauliflower florets,
knocking on your window pane.

They wear invisible crowns of mist,
that crystallize from water drops
the size of grapes or honeydews,
into symmetric arrangements of needles -
A plethora of shapes, some
reproducible in paper cutouts, and some
more uniquely creative; the result of
physical forces like pressure and wind velocities,
that flatten molecules
and press hydro-oxygen atoms
into geometries that create magic,
that sparkle like beads of mica,
that glimmer like iridescent sequins,
that shiver in its lattices,
and vibrate like abacus balls.

Your visitors are
a pale monochrome, white as milk,
created by absorbing the very colors
that distinguish Autumn from Apartheid,
that distinguish malaise from Minetta prints.

They float and swirl
through topographies and ecosystems
across regions, where birds
are flightless,
and Spring is a prehistoric footprint,
and settle on the tarmac of the road
in front of your door,
where ambulances are engaged
in skirmishes between the living and the dead,
flashing lights that glow
a raspberry red and aquamarine.
Someone today will die, and
someone will birth,
and the circle of life will continue
in the way calendars are marked;
a cyclic process that never ends -
Not until you and I become fodder
for the Bougainvillea vines and forget-me-nots
in the forest by the hills.

Your visitors have grown
to hundreds of billions, and
are clones with identical names, Jonas,
Which translates in Hebrew to
the Gift from God.
They fall to the ground,
Tumble gently, and cover the fountains
In anatomies of tulle and organza silk.
Icicles hang from the eyelashes
of streetlights, shaped like pyramids
and ice cream cones - unswayed
By winds roaring across the
lapel of the city at eighty five miles an hour.

Wake up, Odalis, wake up.
They're here, the snow flakes,
singing by your window pane,
smiling at your curtain rings -
While the sun is asleep,
behind a woolly gray sky,
and the moon is bathing in darkness.