Heartland

All afternoon the snowflakes swirl and fall.

In the park, skaters turn on the scraped mirror

of the duck pond. They are entranced by winter

like figurines trapped in a glass ball.

This is a Christmas card, an icon of safety

and it seems to return each year out of a past

that can still reach us. It speaks for things that last,

like a breathless charm against catastrophe

and those who watch from the road are reassured

by the calm skill, the terse redundancy

that circulates in that time-warped vortex

at the edge of day, near the old stone fort

where forebears dreamed, in their nation’s infancy,

that every ill we suffer could be cured.