Someone just wrote an ode to spring
and I am furious.
Stupid tease.
Taunting with dreams of whispered breezes
lifting up the thin skirts of girls
with long legs striding across the grassy quads,
laughing with their heads thrown back,
arms linked,
hair tangled by that self-same breeze…
When all around the snow falls harder and harder
suffocating so the only sound is not birdsong
but the muffled curses
as someone falls on an icy pavement
(exposing nothing interesting, wrapped as they are in
multiple Chicago layers)
and someone else works to scrape snow and frost
off a windowshield
with frozen ungloved hands.
Winters in this city are long
and the joy of pink sunset sky over
a field of white and crystal trees
is fleeting
against the bitter cold.