Magic Show, North Country
The puddling snowbank spills a silver trace,
its melt a mirror shattered on the earth.
A clutch of clouds wings, birdlike, through blue space
above a garden in the throes of birth.
First come snowdrops, then the bumptious crocus.
Pickets of narcissus will fence tulips’
wine-striped cups of heady hocus-pocus.
(Scilla punctuates in blue ellipsis.)
Yet still a lurking wizardry affects
the temperament and temperature of change.
North wind aloft in willows’ wands elects
to make the winter’s passing drawn and strange.
Pearl paschal moon lights wormholes in the lawn,
no living thing unlovely, come the dawn.
Past winner of the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Competition and the Amy Lowell Poetry Prize, Nancy Brewka-Clark lives on Boston’s North Shore. Her poetry collection Beautiful Corpus was published in 2020. Her most recent work appears in the December 2025 edition of Scientific American Magazine.
Some kind of wizardry definitely lurks around these words (line 13 may be the most prominent example). Though being a Bostonian, you can give us many scenes of winter well observed before you dismiss it. But if your sonnet is in part wishful thinking, I can understand, having worked door to door along East Boston’s shoreline in 1971.
In any case, thanks for a memorable sonnet, Ms Schaible.
I beg your pardon, Ms Brewka-Clark! The perils of not being able to see the full screen before a cup of coffee in the am …
Nice sonnet, Nancy. Great imagery!