Last remnants of shabby snowmen <br />Sit, discontentedly morose, <br />Marooned in oceans of green grass <br />Once stolid, solid sentinels <br />Have lost their stern authority <br />But did they ever have much gravitas, <br />Hastily dragooned into being <br />By inexperienced ice-numbed hands? <br />These grubby effigies never assumed <br />Much more than caricatures <br />Of mock-respectability <br />Muffled up in shabby, surplus scarves. <br />With pebble-toothed, skewed, gaping grins, <br />They grimace at sheer folly <br />Of the frost-dazed, snow-crazed youth <br />Who impudently dare suggest that <br />Wind-stripped sticks of broken branch <br />Could serve as useful working hands. <br />If these grey gargoyles could but craft themselves <br />What stylish statues they might have been, <br />Of such design that Michelangelo <br />Would spectacularly fail to emulate; <br />Instead they merely drip and tremble, <br />Subjugated by the tyrant thaw, <br />Their failing powers diminished by the hour <br />Until their last ice-crystal melts <br />And they are ghosts once more <br />In memories of gleeful children <br />And breath of cloud-strewn sky.<br /><br />C Richard Miles<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/melting-snowmen/
