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Lyn Moir

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Snow Angels

My great-aunt taught me how to make snow angels
on a slope near where the Hudson and the Mohawk meet.
An incline’s best: you do not need to fall so far,
the finished picture stands for any passer-by to see.

We did not make them in my Scottish home, the snow
too wet perhaps, and we not dressed for it, legs bare
and blue of knee. But here, my mother’s family had made
these figures since they first settled the land, kids who survived

impervious to cold. I would have thought they’d fled from angels
and such-like papist fripperies. King Charles still had his head
when they began to carve out farms from forest land. Snow fell
and children laughed, flailing their legs and arms for robes and wings,

keeping a weather eye for Indians, their child-size guns
stacked in a tripod in the snow, or sticks if not yet old
enough for firearms. Angels were games that even boys
would play, forget the dangers which could catch the unprepared.

My children are grown up and gone. I have not taken them
to fashion angels in the winter backwoods, nor passed on
tales I scarcely know. I have two handsome pewter ladles
handed down, and memories of indentations in the snow.

Page(s) 35

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