Shivering

From the classroom window
the spangled playground sparkled,
criss-crossed with blackbird braille,
a whirlissimo of fat flakes
as if blown from polar fur.

Come home time,
there were two or three
feet of snow and a magically
vanishing world as the vanilla storm
stole brown and green.

I was five years old, my mother
was at home nursing a sick toddler,
so the teacher told me to join
a group of older children, scarf
around my neck, mittens on hands.

I had to trust and follow,
feet sinking in the shovel-crusted snow –
until we crossed an untouched field.
Snowballs!
They came from all directions.

Big boys shoved ice-cold clumps
down my neck, stole my scarf
and mittens, laughed as tears rolled down
my cheeks and into my mouth, freezing
in Mistral despair as I realised I was alone.

Placing my feet in their deep tracks
until slush trickled into my boots,
I trudged home, where Mum found me
shivering, lips and fingers blue,
teeth chattering so hard I couldn’t say a word.

However beautiful the scene
outside the window, the memory remains
a  blizzard of icicle fragments, a shivering
of flakes that shakes me like a snow globe
every time it snows.

Kim M. Russell, 20th January 2026

Image by Anastasia Kochemasova on Unsplash

It’s Tuesday and I’m hosting this week’s Poetics at the dVerse Poets Pub with New Year snow.

As I mentioned in the prompt, back in the summer, I came across ‘New Year Snow’ by British poet Frances Horovitz.  While it’s a very personal poem, its subject is familiar to those of us who live in the Northern hemisphere. One of the reasons I fell in love with this poem is that it reminded me of Sarah Connor: they were both British poets, their style of writing is eerily comparable, and they wrote about similar topics and themes. They also both died of cancer.

I love the way Horovitz evokes the feeling of a snowy landscape and sets it firmly in the New Year and then zooms in from the wideness of the valley to the ‘first five-pointed flake’ before delivering the snow in the four-line sentence ‘And then snow fell’. I also love the way the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ pulls us into the final scene, has us breathing ‘radiant air like men new-born’ and seeing the children rushing before us, the ‘crystal fields’ and ‘sun’s reflected rose’.

So, whether we live in a place where there is lots of snow or where there is never snow, whether we love it or hate it, we are writing about snow as we see, feel or imagine it.

I used some of Kate Bush’s 50 words for snow in my poem, which revisits my five-year-old self traumatised by snow.

41 thoughts on “Shivering”

  8. The worst kind of snowy trauma!! A young girl, older bully boys, freezing snow, peppered with snowballs … Truly, I am having a difficult time even imagining it. I sincerely hope writing about it is good therapy.

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  14. Snow globes are halls of memory, and you shake it so deeply we are all that child in wonder and misery trekking a frozen white terroir. Those “fat flakes” “as if blown from polar fur” are such a surprising metaphor and enticing entry for the poem. I miiss Sarah so.

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  20. So skillfully written, Kim, a story that unfolds with promising magic that in the hands of bullies turns into the piercing pain of the wintry cold and senseless violence. The poem cuts to the core, that in the midst of “vanilla snow” that foreshadowing “polar bear’s fur” emerges with its teeth and claws leaving a child stricken, body and soul. So sorry that you had to endure this, and that it continues to haunt you so. As a child, I was taught to blame myself for such events as if I had brought it upon myself and so wrestled with shame as well. I hope you didn’t carry such a burden yourself, dear Kim.

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    1. Thank you so much, Dora. It happened at a difficult time, and I was very young, worried about my younger ‘s illness and my parents going through a bad patch. Not long after, I went to live with my grandparents again.

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