Horatian Ode to a Meadville Winter

With deepest apologies to Horace, Keats, Shelley, Rossetti, and anyone else who ever created something beautiful. Also to my grandmother and my first-grade teacher, who expected better.

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Season of clouds, of barren gray and dun

Close bosom-friend of darkness. What is sun?

A thing of faerie.

Bitterest wind, and snow on snow

Relentless misery in this line too, no place to go;

I cannot approve thee.

And yet I could forgive if thou hadst made thy peace

And by the end of February’d ceased

Thy pestilence.

O winter, ah winter, canst not thou see

The month of March is not the place for thee?

Get hence.

Another thing I wish to say concerns your roads

I wouldn’t wish them on rats or pigs or toads;

They are despicable.

Snowplows, all unwitting, have spirited away thy concrete

And left a Swiss cheese where solid and gaseous meet

In random acts of violence.