Hope Everyone Has a Wonderful Thanksgiving Break!

Thanksgiving is on it's way and students are starting to head home. The semester is winding down so do not forget you are coming back to finnish it off. Classes resume on December 1st. Hope everyone travels safely! Enjoy your break!

Ali McKeon

Poem of the Week from Aurora Magazine:

This week's poem comes from Brenda Shaughnessy, an award winning contemporary poet with roots in both Okinawa, Japan and Southern California. With the winter weather rearing its icy head, this poem taps into the nature of dreams, snow, and poetry itself; and will hopefully give you something to talk about other than the weather. Enjoy!

WHY IS THE COLOR OF SNOW?

Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn't?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It's true that snow takes on gold from sunset and red from rearlights. But that's occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites and light? Because snow reflects only itself, self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won't stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don't we melt it?
Aren't we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question—

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

Oh Materialists! Thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets to keep our treasure safe forever,

what world is made, that made us that we keep making and making to replace the dreaming at last.
To stop the terrible dreaming.

posted 11/20/08 by Carol Schuler. To submit information, email schulerc@davisandelkins.edu.