Poems

The Snow Man Louis Mac Neice
His memory was shaped by forgetting Into a snowman, handful by handful;In the end two pebbles for eyes and a cherry wood Pipe clamped in the thin lipped mouth. But was this fellow really his past,This white dummy in a white waste?While the censor works, while the frost holds,Perhaps he will pass--but then he will pass. Yesterday was a dance of flakes Waltzing down, around, and up,But today is lull and smudge, today Is a man with a pipe that will not draw. Today is a legless day with head-on Idiot eyes, a stranded deaf Mute in a muted world. This lump Is what he remembered when he forgot, Already beginning to dribble. Tomorrow Comes the complete forgetting, the thaw.Or is it rather a dance of water To replace, relive, that dance of white?

To forget my memories, and that is existence of snow man. Then the existence of human.

〔160words〕