Night Snow in April / The Good Work by Dave Malone

Night Snow in April  

The night is black and full. 
The town sleeps in the valley,
a silent garden, where pear and apple
shutter their naked blooms.
Before buzzard or crow wake,

it begins to snow. Creamy flakes
fall, the rich dark deepens, this can’t 
be April one thinks, but the whole 
town is covered like this, black 
and white.



The Good Work 

The first delight is the soil. 
How black loam moves between
fingertips, rubs graciously
in the palms like prayer,
falls gently to the earth,
and whispers in this cathedral garden.

I like Sundays here the most
when the town is quiet, the streets
gray and vacant, the trees ripe
with robins and ripped with green arms.
I hoe the tiny rows by hand,
drop the seeds thin as eyelashes
then hide them inside plump mounds
before the rain.

Dave Malone is the author of Tornado Drill and You Know the Ones. He lives in the Missouri Ozarks where he writes poems (sometimes on a Galaxie II typewriter) and enjoys long hikes in the bountiful forest, not far from his town.