Winter Love Scene

By on Jan 13, 2014 in Poetry

Three couples on a wintry road

 

(for Dr. Zhivago)

 

THE SNOW KEPT THE WORLD AWAY
and she held me as gently as sand holds sand.
We moved like shadows moving toward eclipse.
This woman opened her long-silenced lips,
and Noise that had built a fortress in my land
was hushed away, and I was still as lapses
of consciousness at the threshold of a nap.

THE SNOW PROTECTED US
Holding her was a tingling in my nerves.
She knocked gently at my courthouse heart
and penetrated even to the government.
Holding her was the wilderness of wharves
in winter when the sailors all report:
I skipped my ship, now I’m the government.

BUT THE SNOW MELTED
for I could not look perfectly at her,
and we both knew that we must die someday
as the fox dies hunted away from its mate;
for love is like the snowflake stars that whir
around the corner of winter’s galaxy
and then’re gone for good, I tell it to you straight.
Once winter leaves, the snow melts at a rapid rate. 

 

 

About

Andrew Oerke was a Peace Corps Director in Africa and the Caribbean, and for many years president of a private and voluntary organization, working in and visiting more than 160 countries. He was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, and in many other publications in the U.S., England, France, Germany, Lebanon, Malawi, Kenya, the Philippines, Jamaica, and Mexico. In 2003, he was given the award for literature by the UN Society of Writers and Artists.