January 21, 2015

SNOW IN JANUARY

Night snow falls so quietly –

looking out my second floor

window – 2:54 AM. Wow!

It’s a white covered wonderland.

Then back to the dark deep of sleep.

Then it’s 6:45 – an everyday weekday.

I'm jarred awake by the realism

of my alarm. Cold winter mornings

remind me to look outside again.

Poetry, poetry, pictures, pictures,

everywhere. The early morning

pause to take in the whole gallery;

but I have to rush, shower, shave,

Cheerios, coffee, bundle up – to

go out and  push away some snow,

to clean my car, to wince and wipe

my nose in the cold - whispering

to myself, “Eliot is wrong: ‘April

could never be the cruelest month.’*”

© Andy Costello, Reflections 2015

Comment by Micah Matrix: “The famous first line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was almost certainly not written in April but in January. In a letter on January 23, 1921, Eliot refers to the nascent poem as ‘the first writing of any kind I have done for six months.’ Two weeks later, he showed the completed first section ‘in 4 parts’ to Wyndham Lewis. (Eliot would add a fifth part in May, which he placed at the beginning of the poem, but he would later remove it at Ezra Pound’s suggestion.) These details, along with other material evidence, show, as Lawrence Rainey has argued in Revisiting “The Waste Land,” that the poem was most likely begun in January and completed sometime in December 1921.” First Things, 4-5-13

Painting on Top: "January Ball Field" by Sarah Yuster