How to Break Snow

Something foreign helps,
armored vehicles
adorned with unfamiliar grim-faced eagles
rolling down white slopes,
and explosions in the distance,
close at hand—
loud red, even louder black,
instant thaw.
No tool more expedient
than soldiers pounding on a door,
the path more hob-nailed print
than even sheen,
roof and eaves cascading
into a thousand unwanted avalanches.
Trampling is the devil's gift
to busting up the slush,
men bound and gagged and dragged
by many more arms that necessary,
cutting a swathe highway wide,
all the way to the city square.
Line them up before the statue
of the town's dead founder.
Execute — the perfect way to shatter.
Bullets do it in miniature,
dozens of them
splattering red so far and wide,
you begin to wonder
how the earth ever once thought
it could be all over white.
Sure, April will do the job eventually.
But this is now.
And Spring may not yet
find the courage.