Snow Rain / Raymond Holden

Snow Rain

I am not one to mind the rain when it comes
Fingering the sinking snow and leaving prints
Of passage hard to tell from the touch of grass
Bent by a rabbit's frenzy or the wind.
Days like to-day there is something very near
Always upon the point of breaking through.
Men of the mountain towns in the milk-train
Quicken the air with tales of leaping deer
And myths of caribou gone fifty years
Come back to visions straining beyond sight.
Something of me goes out into their talk
For I have lain upon the quiet snow
Watching for flying feet and listening
For the murmuring trees to burst with sudden wings,
And I have felt the drops, as they fall now
Come down almost in passion for a world
Made beautiful by the presence of glad men.
Even now I think there is something very close
Ready to sweep like rainfall over me,–
These men, the lingering patterns of the snow,
The wet that alters them, the purple river,
I climb upon these things almost to touch
The beauty of that power I almost know.

~~

Raymond Holden (1894-1972)

from Granite and Alabaster, 1922

[Poem is in the public domain in the United States]

Raymond Holden biography