by Susanna Lang
No one remembered snow falling in Baghdad.
We didn’t even have a word for this whiteness:
we called it a kind of rain, and used our phones to take pictures
so our grandchildren would know it really happened.
But the pictures did not show how this rain clung to the edges of things,
blurring one with the other, until the house we’d never entered
could have been our house; but only for a moment, like in the old stories
where if you spoke of the magic it would vanish.
There was even a rumor—who knows? it could be true—
that a snowman had been made in Balad, fifty miles north.
I do not know whether this is a lesson from God, said our neighbor.
Maybe snow is the language God speaks in,
when we have forgotten how to speak except in fire.
A collection of Susanna Lang’s poems has been accepted for publication next spring by The Backwaters Press. She has published original poems and essays, and translations from the French, in such journals as The Baltimore Review, Kalliope, Southern Poetry Review, World Literature Today, Chicago Review, New Directions, Green Mountains Review, Jubilat, and Rhino. Book publications include translations of Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, both by Yves Bonnefoy. She won a 1999 Illinois Arts Council award for a poem published in The Spoon River Poetry Review. She lives with her husband and son in Chicago, where she teaches at a Chicago Public School.
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