Some gods must be stacking blocks of ice,

Facet to facet, for makeshift towers

To house the oracle

Who speaks the capillating Borealis

Into the south.

For the sky never could say itself out

On such a day.  

But for us there is only one God,

And the wailing wall,

An alabaster tree sprouting

Knotted prayers for fruit.

No vehicles ventured much this morning,

Trees rigged out in spongy snow,

Fresh drifts of sufficient size

To help us understand the departed storm.

All day we skated and played puck,

Until the crust of twilight burned.

We shouldered our sticks and met

The Orthodox fathers and children

Scrolling home their sleds.  

The family still walks, therefore,

The stages of an ancient moment.

Though unable to voice a vow of stability,

Despite Hadrian and the Holocaust,

Still look, we hold

Our crumpled fruit upward,

Our daily upward waiting cries

Hammered out of

Isolation, neuroses, displacement,

That fragrant Jerusalem be this evening,

In handwritten notes

Of childhood’s snowdrift, a candle,

For those unspoken songs collect and scatter

And bathe beyond the natural effect

Of the playful gift we were taking home,

A light that gives what we never had,

Stretches over us the something canopy

By which we arrive equal to the day,

For it had been a day and we had skated hard.

John Hamel has been a teacher all his life. Currently he teaches adult classes in literature at the Northrop Center in Rochester, Minnesota, where he has lived for the past three years. His poems have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Journal of American Poetry and Arion. Instragram: johnerichamel