First Snowfall

Just yesterday these trees were bare
But now they’re feathered thick with snow.
Such seasoned stillness holds it there.
The world is quiet, cold—although

I spy a cardinal resting on
A bending, overladen limb;
A bright red ruby cabochon
With diamonds to encircle him.

He looks at me a bit askance
To halt my steps. I acquiesce.
He holds me like I’m in a trance
To merge me with the motionless.

Daniel Jabe is an Ohio attorney whose poems have been published in Modern Age, First Things, The Road Not Taken, and elsewhere.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”