Episode #140 First Snow - Aria Aber

Connor and Jack discuss the poem "First Snow" by Aria Aber. They explore the poem's subtle and marvelous use of perspective, the representation of snow and frost, and the poem's resonances with the devastating impact US war and intervention has had on Afghanistan.

Learn more about Aria Aber here: https://www.ariaaber.com/

Get a copy of her debut collection Hard Damage here: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496215703/

Find Aber's resources to support Afghans here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10-SLGJEb39jpN_vEw8ruvba3iS1BmeU5QoW1AdGEL7M/edit

First Snow

By: Aria Aber

How easy for snow to turn to ice, for snow

to disappear the light from the ragged

frame of chestnut trees around the warehouse

by what’s left of wild chicory, scraped

sculptures, weeping dogbane. Hunger borders

this land, while snow turns all to immigrants,

snow salts the embankment, where turtles wash ashore,

literally hundreds of them, frozen hard

like grenades of tear gas thrown across

a barbwire fence. But who of their free

will would ever want to climb that fence

to live here, who would pray each night

for grace, hoping to pass through the darkened veil

of shit, to bear witness to smokestacks,

wild champion, knapweed? Who’d loiter around cricks

glistening with oil, which, once gone,

will, like death, at last, democratize

us all? On potato sacks in the snowcapped,

abandoned warehouse, there huddle and sit

the soiled refugees, bereft, cow-eyed,

picking dirt off their scalps, their shelled soles.

Among them, wordless, is my mother,

and nestled on her lap is I, in love with the light

of the first snow of my life, so awed

and doubtful still of what lengths the frost wills

to go, and what shape it will then take—

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