An inch of fresh, wet snow
has coated everything uncovered
along the roads mapping the hills
south of Saint Joe toward Kansas City.

Mounded branches of pine and cedar
bend toward earth 
like paesants bowed by the weight of harvest

Bare branches bear their gleaming sheaths
above the dappled carpet of last week's storm.
The forms of weeds and grass
stipple through the lower mat.
Tall thistles thrust only the tops of bristled blooms
through their covering caps of frozen clusters.

Across the hills, in the ditches and dips,
ripples offer muted suggestions of terrain;
the plain shapes softened by the rounded edges
of clinging mounds set down by the soft storm.

Under low hanging clouds 
and the nebulous form of a shifting fog,
morning's gray hazes the splendor.

Just before the rest stop south of New Camden,
near the top of the rise on I-29, 
a break of sunshine glimmers in our passing,
a sudden brilliant blaze of reflected sun
brings bursts of light from every trunk and stem,
every blade and husk an almost blinding white.

Perhaps it is not so much the work of Light
to create Beauty (though it might be argued so),
as it is to let us see, even if only momentarily,
what was already there,
yet in greater dimension 
than what we thought we already knew.

Perhaps something a bit closer to Truth.


H. Arnett
1/26/23