Today we have another Mutabilis Press poet, Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld.

I really love the way this poem’s trades in metaphors about snow. I live in a place that doesn’t see much of it, but oh, how I love the snow. (Insert pithy knowing comment about how those two circumstances might be related.)

This poem also inspires me with its fortitude and strength.

Much Snow in a Warm Clime

The white mums are on the march again,
huge mounds that crowd out everything else.

The advice I got: Don’t cut them back.
They will break of their own weight,
a natural pruning. It is always warm here.
When I look out, though—winter or summer—
these bushes seem dressed
in the white blessings of snow.

“Seem,” I said. I am here unbroken.
Many snows crown my head. This weight
and too many natural prunings
bow me down.

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Go to this month’s first Poem-A-Day to learn how to participate in a game as part of this year’s series. You can have just a little involvement or go all the way and write a cento. I hope you’ll join in!

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Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld is a Texan again for the third time. Marjorie has been an SMU Press manuscript editor, SMU English instructor, and U.S. Navy missile analyst. She has led poetry therapy with forensic patients and created three websites to commemorate perished European Jewish communities. Marjorie’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals as well as online. Her poem “Angel” is in the revised edition of The Auschwitz Poems. Additionally, one poem appears in Patrick Dempsey’s book Babi Yar, along with Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar.” The poet’s chapbook, Fringing the Garments, was published by Pecan Grove Press.