January 2025 (One Hundred Year Snowfall)
on Jim Dine’s lithograph, “7 Days of Creation: Snow”
White rooftops, tiles, shingles obliterated,
even buried my city became alive in snow:
novel, a rarity each century,
sporadic, usually sheathing
then melting upon contact
to disappointment’s consistency,
the slush between solid and liquid.
A pair of cardinals appeared on the white fence
when we made snow angels with expedient wings.
This time eleven inches on record,
fell in muffled breaths, like Goliath exhaling,
flakes mottled banana and ginger leaves,
drifts skirted camellias,
satsuma roots concealed by accumulation
different than frequent floods,
those and this reaching our knees,
ready to genuflect, bearing witness
to another genesis.
Gina Ferrara lives in New Orleans. She has six poetry collections including her latest, The Rooted and Recurrent, which was published by UL Press. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Metaphrastics, and The Gyroscope Review. She teaches at Delgado Community College, and since 2007 she has curated The Poetry Buffet, a monthly reading series in New Orleans. In 2025, she was appointed poet laureate of Louisiana.