The snow was falling on the beach
and so the children
gathered it
into their hands.
They mixed white sand and whiter frost
into balls of light
and threw them. I watched
a girl’s eye drift naked among the tide.
I watched the evening give way
to the boulevard.
And when the snow moved
inland, I became scared
for them, of how this will seem
in memory, if this was happiness,
and if it were me, what might this
have meant. How unreal
seems a child’s mind, these brief comets
smoldering
at my feet.
Timothy Daniel Welch received his PhD from Florida State University and his MFA from San Diego State University. Originally from Orange County, California, he now lives happily in Madison, Wisconsin after being awarded the 2013-14 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Creative Writing. He currently teaches at Blackhawk Technical College in Janesville, and his poems may be found in Rattle, Arts & Letters, and Best New Poets.
Latest posts by Timothy Daniel Welch (see all)
- The Children - August 5, 2015
