Alberta Clipper 12/23/14: “As the Snowplows Tear the Streets” by Greg Kuzma

The winters of 1973 and 1974 in Lincoln, NE, were interesting times for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Cornhuskers. Tom Osborne, a familiar name amongst Husker enthusiasts, spent his first year as head coach of the Cornhuskers in 1973. In the following season, Tom Osborne coached the Huskers all the way to the Cotton Bowl, where they played a long-standing rival, Texas, concluding the game with a victory.

The end of December in 1973 also experienced one of the coldest recorded minimum temperatures ever seen in Lincoln, NE, reaching a low of -20° Fahrenheit. In the winter of 1974, snow came particularly late with the earliest recorded precipitation date falling in the middle of December. In Prairie Schooner’s Winter 1973/74 issue, Greg Kuzma’s poem “As the Snowplows Tear the Streets” was published. Greg Kuzma attended Syracuse University and is professor emeritus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Greg Kuzma currently resides in Crete, Nebraska. –Clarissa Siegel-Causey

Greg Kuzma
As the Snowplows Tear the Streets

It is in me to dream of snow falling
into the eyes of the animals, the place is
far back in the branches of the tress
where even the trees do not dream, where
months of afternoons have rung to wood,
and the trunks are deep. Here the snow
is falling without alarms, the sun shines
out of the ground, the animals walk on
the proffered roots of plants, and the
rain and the ghost of the rain
make the same bright sign in the fruit.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Winter 1973)