Winter
A Poem by Rachel Hadas
On the bus against our father’s tweed shoulder, my sister sleeps. When she wakes up one cheek will be moist, herringboned, and red. Late afternoon, the lamplit living room: propped on our elbows, he and I arrange buttons from my mother’s button jar into a long-tailed dragon on the floor. Some power beyond memory has rinsed the grime of more than half a century from these two vignettes and made them glow. Riverside Park across the street: the trees are bare, and now the sun is going down, black against the sky. The pewter river has begun to freeze. It looks like snow.
Evening at Riverside Park, Alice Neel, 1927
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"Riverside Park across the street: the trees
are bare, and now the sun is going down,
black against the sky. The pewter river
has begun to freeze. It looks like snow."
-- A perfectly visually stanza, clear and cold. I should know. I live a block from Riverside Park.
Because Moses Hadas appears in the first stanza, I must link to his daughter's fine essay about him here in the comments: https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/many-lives-moses-hadas