White Fields (a poem)

I wrote and first published this poem in “The Voice” Newspaper in 2002.

White Fields

There are no sanctions in life,
each thought or action is balanced.
Each day brings night
each wrong brings right,
to the right of darkness is light.

Rolling and level fields of white
stretch before the wanderers of life.
Every knoll has a vale,
every depth has a height.

There may be fences or covered rocks,
mole holes or a tree here and there.
White fields lie flat as mats,
not as carpets of color,
but with holograms of life
darting in and out of sight.

Spirits may wing by
as a swift blast of wind,
or tread lightly nearby
embodied in the coat of a deer.

A message of memory
in a frozen fallen leaf
whirls at play near my feet.
A dancing thought on a white field
of nearly forgotten time,
known only to a single mind.

White fields of winter
crusted over by ice,wind and snow
melted by harsh rays of sun
or broken by footsteps leading on,
to a forest or into the horizon,
to a destination known only to one.

White fields of melancholy places
as blank expressions on white faces.
A blank stare at the world
where no color dots the landscape
to create beauty or evoke complex passions.

There are white fields that remain untrodden
outlined by green borders
of golf courses and cultured forests.
There live snowmen, snow women and snow children,
within the boundaries of white fences
in white sounding towns.

Towns of milk and money,
snow white people with Christian virtues
suffering snowy,spiritual hallucinations,
and discomforts of frozen noses and cracked lips,
chapped by blistering boredom of dreary days
of blinding white.

They read sun-blinded blurbs on newsprint,
snowy computer and television screens,
causing infectious white diseases of
eye strain and migraines cured by aspirin,
alcohol, Prozac or cocaine.

Though global warming may melt away
layers of ancient ice
exposing a colored history,
white fields will remain white,
until the rains of change
destroy all in anarchy.

Then the muddy colors
of mad and mighty rivers
overflowing their banks,
will forever change
the once white landscape.

L.A. Steel