Two recent poems by Hannah Vogel

 March 2020

There’s something in the breath of snow
That puts the world to sleep. 
Snowflakes murmur unspoken vows 
And fractals secrets keep.

The groundhogs grovel lower now 
Into their shanty dens. 
The sight of nimbostratus clouds 
Unfurls upon the glen.

In the shade of powdered evergreens  
The white-tailed deer step high; 
The fawns born springtime’s brevity 
Shall shiver while they die.

And old bucks come count their blessings, 
And old doe come count their bucks. 
Their judgment day is pressing 
On lungs the frost has struck.

But storms themselves are brevities, 
Like does and bucks and fawns, 
And winter fever’s remedy 
Is berry blooms and awns.

So soon the thickets deepen; 
The game trails wind away;
No groundhogs foresee their reaping 
Among the deer’s decay.

Hannah smiles at her sister Maren.  Collen is their grandmother.

Sometimes the world ...

Sometimes the world comes apart at its seams
Like embroidery on an ill-tailored dress 
Or stitching on a child’s teddy bear,
Loved too hard and abused twice to that crime. 
Then like some post-apocalyptic vale, 
The roads, those skeletons of us, are bare
Save the cracks who lacerate their arching backs;
Whose origins these amble minds perplex.
And in the fields ‘side these nightmarish bones
The stumps of corn stalks cut before the snow
Have reemerged from weeks of that pyrite glow
And rest in rows that reach on for miles
Like headstones, in this graveyard that turns over 
year after year, names erased, henge askew,
half-buried in the years of flower mulch
And climbing moss that holds a dead man’s hue.
And lurching in the soil soft from mild tears
They lean aside as though to say
“Thanatos spares no mother or her brood.” 
In this, in some cold-dired mood, the land
Some bloom has just begun to entertain
Past days rolling over like clouds and rain.
The fields, rolling over, look almost dun
Has Gaea herself turned over her grave
Such that crows congregate but share no feasts?
They toss the bones; they read the leaves;
Those Haruspices divining doom
And know they need not fear their hunger soon. 
The crow flies; birds sing; crows feet keep eyes company.