Snow Falling on a Nation

I love the sound of snow… You can hear it even if you are only standing on a balcony. [The sound] is only minimal, not even a real noise: a breath, a trifle of a sound. You have the same thing in music: if in the score there is a pianissimo marked that ends in nothing. Up there you can feel this ‘nothing’. With an orchestra it is very difficult to achieve it. The Berlin Philharmonic manage(s) it sometimes.
Claudio Abbado

how can i love that which
has not been fully experienced
like the sight of snow falling on trees
stripped of leaves in the fall?

but fully imagined
i see snow falling and
shrouding bloodied corpses,
washing clean and clear of suspicions
these snuffed out lives

in a country that knows of
seasons of dust and of wet on wet,
i desire the benediction of snow,
a rest from the burst of bullets
and cusses

the arbitrary blankness,
the nothingness of
whitened landscapes
with a hint of resurrection
pushing out of sorrow’s
inhospitable ground

Manila, Philippines
Nov. 17, 2016

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