By Terry Savoie
That Snow Day
hibernates inside his heart
for more than a month before
cautiously emerging on a bitterly
cold January evening as he rests
his forehead against the upstairs
bedroom window & watches
those first hesitant snowflakes
falling, soft promises of a possible
blizzard coming overnight, sheets
of white to blanket roofs & streets,
the sidewalks & everything hinting
of the human so that, in the morning,
he wakes to an impossibly unfettered
freedom for one miraculous day
minus school books, pencils & row
after row of desks screwed down
on wooden skids all in linoleum-
block, regimented order, the day
ahead filled with adventure
with waxed cardboard sleds
& snow forts built on that hilly
knob, Mt. Peony, a quarter mile
down the road, an entirely un-
charted day of wonder that opens
with a maddened dash in his
pj’s to all the windows as he glues
his nose to pane after frosted pane,
one luxuriously long day, un-
mapped hours of reckless,
carefree time stretching ahead,
a day that smiles as it returns to him
with that same aching anticipation from
the distance of more than half a century.
Terry Savoie is a retired teacher living in Coralville. He has had more than three-hundred and fifty poems published in the past thirty-five years. These include ‘The Iowa Review,’ ‘North American Review,’ ‘Poetry,’ ‘Ploughshares’ and recent issues of ‘Birmingham Poetry Review,’ ‘North Dakota Review’ and ‘America.’ This article was originally published in Little Village issue 217.
