Snow Again by Jacob M. Appel

Raging against the grizzly dawn

Shoulders burning and cheeks aflame

Yet the drive still a sea of level white

I spot a child’s nose pressed against

The neighbor’s glass. My dormant,

Ice-braced shovel stands a yardstick

By which to measure work undone

And yet undoing.

Only scrapes from my neighbor’s dig

Mar our reveries: his child dreaming

Of igloo forts and ammunition globes

While he anticipates a future frigid morn

When his son will grow into his labors,

And he will watch with his own nose

Pressed to the same frost-latticed glass,

Cozy in the pride of a job well-done.

That’s the crick with kids and shoveling:

They do for a while. Then they don’t.

Originally published in The Cynic in Extremis (Able Muse Press, 2018)

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Jacob M. Appel MD JD MPH is Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine and an emergency room psychiatrist in the Mount Sinai Health System.  Jacob is the author of eighteen books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, including a compendium of ethical conundrums drawn from medicine and healthcare (Who Says You're Dead?).  He is co-chair of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry's Committee on Law & Psychiatry and a judge for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.  More at:  www.jacobmappel.com