SNOWSCAPES

by Megan Pinto

A great procession is honking across ice
where geese call out to one another 
before taking off in flocks. Water makes 
their landings seem soft.
Some play and others carefully place
their webbed feet down upon ice. Some amble 

across the beach;  they stop to prod 
bottles and chicken bones frozen 
along the shore.
In Raleigh, where I grew up,
snow would grace us momentarily, 

like a lapse in the landscape’s memory. 
For a few hours, for a  few days, I was betrayed 
by my cotton sweatpants and tennis shoes.

All my life, I’ve had doubt in the spiritual sense. 

In the South: a familiar poster,
plastered on the walls of every 
school, waiting room: a pair 
of lone footprints trailing in sand. 
The speaker’s voice (a man) asks God
 If you are with me, then where 
are your feet? And God says,
Who do you think carried you
through the deep, dark waters, across 
an open sea?  The nun’s habits swept 
against the floor, collecting dust as fine 

as what was falling outside. Of the landscape, 
a sudden quiet. Even when birds 
flocked to our gardens for nourishment.

Some say love is shapeless, but still, 
we try to measure it in words, breath, 
feet. Others: love is not shapeless, but 
embodied –like those beams of  light 
where geese now rest.
Water laps the ice.

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books, 2024). Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, AAWW's The Margins, Lit Hub and elsewhere. Megan has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Storyknife, The Peace Studio and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Most recently, she received the 2023 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review, and was selected for Poets & Writers 2024 Get the Word Out poetry cohort. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson. Find her online at www.meganpinto.com.