Several times each winter, snow would close

our businesses and schools, and highway signs

would urge caution: Speed Reduced to 45.

 

Heading to work on those vacant streets,

the swirling flakes would hide the way ahead,

and you could only hope the interstate

was still tied to your destination.

 

Now the robins have returned, ducks have found

their flooded ditches, and the sun rises

sooner, warmer. But the roads are still bare,

amber signs now flicker: Stay home; save lives.

 

The world seems coated in this contagion–

spiked, minute, symmetric, and so like

a snowflake, though each is identical,

rolling and drifting in a driving wind.

 

Fingers locked around the steering wheel,

we drive, essential and non-essential alike,

blind and anxious toward the horizon.

 

Kevin Casey is the author of Ways to Make a Halo (Aldrich Press, 2018) and American Lotus, winner of the 2017 Kithara Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2018). And Waking… was published by Bottom Dog Press in 2016. His poems have appeared in Rust+Moth, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Connotation Press, Pretty Owl Poetry, Poet Lore and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column ‘American Life in Poetry.’ For more, visit andwaking.com.