A poem about the first snowfall of the season

Today was the first snowfall of the Winter, and we woke up to the brightness of snow blanketing everything outside – almost as if the snow were the sun coming up. It made me think of a poem that I wrote a few years ago about this very thing.

Snow Has No Vanity

Snow goes away.
It always does.

You try to keep it, 
Stare hard at it, memorize it.
Put a ball of it in the freezer.
Lick it, sit in it,
lie down and make a snow angel.

Think that if you pay attention,
it will stay, like a girl 
who knows she’s pretty
and waits to be appreciated.
And if not, sulks and goes off.

It goes away in any case.
Of course it does.

But it comes back too,
in its own sweet time,
exactly as you remember it - 
blue-white, hushed, 
and filled with stars:

That is the randomness
and the wonder of it.

By The Bear of Little Brain, from the collection “Snow Falling From Cedars”, 2012.