In it’s first instant
The first moment
It’s first thought
The first feelings
Falling – drifting –
Gracefully dropping
From unknown origins
The air is cold and
Powerful, pulling, dragging
But the snowflakes
Never collide or touch
Graceful chaos –
This snowflake
And it’s unique pattern
It can’t remember the time before
Maybe the other flakes
Have forgotten too
It floats and falls
Surfing on gusts
Still never touching
The multifarious falling flakes
On a journey down
Down to the endless white
What is the destination –
After the eternity
The snowflake lands
On the branch of a tree
The other flakes continue down
To the whiteness from which
The tree protrudes
The flake sits alone –
It wonders again of
The time before the fall
And where it came from
No memories are there
The other flakes sit together
On other branches and the ground
Other flakes have stopped falling
This flake sits at the top of a tree
Overseeing so many
Distant and cut off from so many
It wonders how all the other
Flakes can be together
How were they able to come together –
Children below play with
Multiple flakes packed together
Snowballs, snowmen, snow angels
The one flake envies the fun
All the flakes participate
Except this one
Who doesn’t know how
To join with another flake
Who sits atop the tree
Afraid to join the crowd –
The night falls and passes
And the sun creeps
Into existence
The air is still cold
But lifeless –
The flake watches it’s
Brethren disappear
In large patches
Vanishing, melting
Where have they gone
And did they go together –
In it’s last instant
The last moment
It’s last thought
The last feelings
Drifting – darkness –
A lonely sleep
From the poetry collection Cats, Coffee, Catharsis.
James Pack 