Trick or Treat!

I took a walk around the hood late Saturday and early Sunday. The park was but dogs appeared, magically, in the snow. Walking the pathways and heading back to my cozy, heated apartment feels like a luxury knowing how many are freezing and shivering down on Liberty Street.

The snow-laden branches seemed like weeping willows along the benches of Prospect Park West, reminding me of a line from an old Robert Frost poem, "Birches,"

When I see branches bend from left to right
Along the lines of straighter, darker trees
I'd like to think some boy's been swinging them
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
Ice storms do that....

You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. 

So during an early snowfall in October it is no doubt a red flag reminding us a crisis is at hand, but there is still poetry in the fall-out and beauty in the green foilage against blankets of snow. 

Robert Frost also wrote, "We dance around in a circle and suppose, while the secret sits in the middle and knows." 

Maybe the secret to reversing global warming is just around the corner. Maybe when Occupy Wall Street makes some headway in balancing the economic injustice, it will take on environmental justice as well.

Occupy Winter! Anyone?