First Snow
War has a shadow that lingers, like weather, like today, the cold crowded peaks and ferocious grasses in confusion. A profusion of frost and flowers searching, searching, their hearts fibrillating like a sparrow in a cat’s maw, and the earth, skin like granite, flecked by knots of new growth, stubborn, twisted grasses who whisper wicked, sinful things to the wind under the cataract clouds, carrying slender pearl flakes with wings. The old alfalfa stalks ripple tensely; they can hardly contain their sorrow. Our bombardments have come. There is no loneliness as joyful as an open field of alfalfa below mountains and heavy clouds before destruction; the beautiful uncut hair of graves of those creatures great and small whose names no one will ever remember. Now, gray concrete and electric light skate hand in hand, where in the distance in a dim barn, a father and son hurry the horses into their stalls as we begin our bombing run. Snow drifts from the winter sky that’s pale as milk. Our steel birds, in perfect formation, empty themselves in deafening resonance, cluster bombs fall into the place that is open and smooths the rough edges until everything and everyone is blind and mute.
This poem is excerpted from Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Press, 2026), edited by Anne Coray, J. C. Todd, and Teresa Mei Chuc.
This is the first of three poems from the anthology reprinted in Terrain.org over the third week of May 2026. As an introduction to the poems, read Teresa Mei Chuc’s “War and Its Impact on Non-Human Life.”
Sean Mclain Brown is a combat disabled Marine Corps veteran. His writing is deeply shaped by the consequences of war, as a teacher of writing at De Anza College and Western Connecticut State University, and as a member of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Veterans Writing Group. His poetry and fiction have appeared in more than 50 journals, including San Francisco Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, Fourteen Hills, and Indiana Review; as well as in the anthologies Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (Koa Books) edited by Maxine Hong Kingston, An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), and Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Press).
Header photo by rikinik, courtesy Shutterstock.
