SILENT REFLECTION WHILE SHOULDERED ON THE HIGHWAY BY HEAVY SNOW
Snow-laced trees
interweave their burdened boughs,
branches bowing in a gelid sepulcher,
stooping low with ice-encumbered touch,
enclosing the layered bands of natural pattern
within their folding trunks.
My eyes trace the reappearing forms of line
in every scale of existence.
Striations of ice lacing
a frozen latticework across my windschield.
Striations of salt tracing
tire-worn roadsides,
adorned with stalled vehicles
stopped by winter’s forcing stillness.
Striations of wrinkled skin, dry and cracking
across the back of my gripping fist,
steering wheel steadily gyrating
with the loss of speed.
Striations of slicing clouds stretched thin
like a striped sky shroud
where the sunset’s ebbing orb
defies the crucifixion of dusk.
A transparent veil of citrus is saturated gauze
failing to compress the burning colors of
the horizon’s bleeding wounds.
A seasonal slumber satiates
the roaring mechanical cacophony.
Muting the mad daily torrent,
of accelerated cityscapes
with a ceasing blanket
of softly flaking sanity.
Crystalline purity,
freezing the breathless rush of the world.
Halting metropolitan order
with silence and distance,
and a simplistic admonition from the wintertide-
To pause, to breathe, and to recognize
our inescapable acquienscence to nature’s ascendancy.
By Aaron Conklin
Aaron is the Creative Writing teacher at Warrensburg High School in Warrensburg, Missouri. Aaron says about his poem and its creation, “images of landscapes, traffic, blizzard-like conditions through a car window that has been slowed to a stop on the highway. During the forced pause from winter I was able to appreciate the beautiful patterns in everything around me. Simplistic details often overlooked when riding in the work day’s commuting stampede.” The poem also invokes a deeply held reverence for nature’s power.