"The Snow Globe" by Daniel Tobin from PRESENCE

Today's poem is by Daniel Tobin

The Snow Globe

Like the time-frosted cataract
on my third eye, this tattered
fog of dust slowly weathers
beneath the hairline fissure
of the orb my grandmother
kept forever on her dresser.
It's sifting here fifty years,
a frozen smoke, upwards
invisibly where her palm-
sized-planet horizons darkly
into halves, the almost in-
discernable seam wizened
brown, as if groundwater
had found its natural pore
the way we are elides to were
until what rose inside was air.
There, the Little Flower gazes
calmly past a world she sees—
books, laptop, the whole array
of my office's objets trouve
the dear ghosts spurn—though
she's ankle-deep in wasted snow
that is marsh and mire, the gulf
bound for a farther atmosphere.

Copyright © 2025 Daniel Tobin All rights reserved
from Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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