Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: The Street

Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

The distinguished poet Lewis Turco, of Dresden Mills, has been writing poetry of great variety over many years. In today?s poem he describes the onset of a snowstorm.

The Street by Lewis Turco

In the street the wind gutters, moving papers
and leaves into heaps or sworls.
The scraps of the year make some kind of pattern,
some calligramme of their own,
beyond the imprint of new snow.
Lightly, on the flourishes of silence,
on the heaps of leaf,
the snow touches and explores.
Finally, in folds of stillness,
flakes begin to form wrinkles of crystal.
By the time dusk deepens,
the wrinkles will be pure streams
drowning whatever is old.
Then, in the night, in the darkest hours,
the road will be a river of snow
aiming toward morning, lost at either end
in the curbs of vision.

Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2007 by Lewis Turco. Reprinted from Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959-2007, Star Cloud Press, 2007, by permission of Lewis Turco. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to David Turner, Special Assistant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at poetlaureate@mainewriters.org or 207-228-8263.