Snowbanks
When your soul is wobbly with vertigo,
drunk on the reality of nothing left to do,
step into the blizzard and listen to the snow.
Each flake is a whisper,
each drift a direction,
each pawprint someone who came before.
It will get cold.
There’s no way to avoid it.
But, even the sun falls,
frozen wood eventually burns,
and the scent of smoke on the wind,
leads you somewhere.
If all these fail,
winter will numb you,
until you’ll feel
only what she needs you to.
You might collapse onto snowbanks, then,
but you’ll learn – yes, you’ll learn
that snow is softer than bare stone.
Will Falk is a biophilic writer and lawyer born in Evansville, IN. The natural world speaks and Falk's work is how he listens. His book How Dams Fall – a work of creative nonfiction chronicling his involvement in the first-ever federal lawsuit seeking rights of nature for a major ecosystem, the Colorado River – was published by HomeBound Publications in August 2019. He is currently traveling through the Ohio River basin writing a book about his relationship with the Ohio River.