Ben Hecht

A GREAT white leopard prowling silently

Over the house-tops, up and down the sky,

Trailing its ermine and its ivory—

The lithe and sinuous snow creeps softly by.

The air is crowded and the day alight;

The houses etched in stuccoed boundaries

Loom radiant, while in capricious flight

The snow paints ghostly summer on the trees.

With opals and with lustered silks inlaid

The snow spreads out its long unbroken seas,

And frames each house in candied masquerade

Of quaint and crystaline geometries.

Perhaps the snow is an enchanted rain,

Or, swarming white and gently to and fro,

The souls of little birds come back again

And searching for the sky they used to know.

The snow falls thicker, and a spectral night

Bursts without sunset in a wind-whirled glow,

Blotting the day and leaving more alight

The glistening white nocturne of the snow.

The stiff and tangled avenues become

Like some vague field of dreams that hides behind

A strange and delicate delirium

Of labyrinthine pallors, swift and blind.

The snow seems rising—a fantastic spray

Some sharp and sinister wind has given wing;

And all the world is blowing fast away,

The houses and the trees first vanishing.

The world is but a shimmering pastel,

A whimsically chiseled cameo

Whose life seems only the ephemeral

And pale diaphonous music of the snow.

The snow has ended and the highways lie

In lacquered desolation; and outthrown

The blue and staring shadow of the sky

Appears above the emptied air—alone.

The night is not so silent as the snow

And yet the night is dark and mute and deep—

The faery stains that wander to and fro

Are what the night is dreaming in its sleep.