The Snow of Petals on the Fallen World: Some Second Thoughts on Capra

And yet, at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life,
After the clement snows have come again,

And the American miracle of money,
The petals still remain fallen from the rose.

What’s been restored is the life once fled from,
And while George Bailey’s met his angel,

He’s also felt the black wind that lives
In the faces of these people he thought he knew,

The wind of zeroes they stood in, alone
In the cold, where they cast him. Years later,

I wonder, when the miraculous has fallen
Back into routine, what will he make

Of that darkness? Coming home each night
To the same draughty house he complained of,

What then? Will that bell still ring as clear
A blessing from the limbs of its tinseled tree?