The Poetics of Snow

Outside, a light mid-December snow falls through the halo-y light of the streetlights as I write these words.

Words: it’s the power and suggestion of words that makes me think of other words right now, specifically the words of Hai Duong Le, a student I once worked with at Chadsey High School, who had these words to say about his first encounter with snow. He had just come to America from Vietnam, where he had to leave his grandparents behind “to move to America to find a better life.” Two weeks later he found himself in the middle of America, in Iowa, in the middle of winter.

“I had never seen anything like this before. At first I thought it was cotton falling down from the sky, except it was cold. It was snow, I finally found out. I had never heard of snow before, let alone seen it. In Vietnam, I knew about the movie Snow White, but I didn’t know about snow. We didn’t know that snow was something you could play in, that it was something you could make snowmen out of. And now, every time it snows, I feel happy.”

Like snow itself, words are “something you could play in,” something you can make something lasting—a poem, a story—out of our experiences which tend to fade away unless we can find a way to hold them, fixed, frozen, in time.

So yes, the snow falling from the sky right now is a metaphor for what we do at InsideOut.

We ask our students to remember, to look, to look inside, to make out of memory and feeling “word-people,” word-pictures we sometimes call them, or maybe we can even see them as snow-poems that will not melt once you place them snugly onto the cold white space that is the page.

The page, then, as a place where the snowflakes of our lives—those tiny moments that make up who we were and who we are—might find a new place to call home, a new homeland, not unlike Hai Duong Le who learned to find happiness in a snowflake.

May we all be able to find such peace and happiness this holiday season.

Or in the words of InsideOut 4th grader Jay’Den McClain:

May songs go through your heart
to shine out bright.

May poems fall down as little snow
flakes in the sky.

May Christmas trees be like little stars.