Looking Back Across the Border

A Short History of Snowflakes

     in Contemporary America

When I was a kid, snowflakes were pretty things,  

and pretty good things at that, every one unique,

no two alike, pretty much the go-to feelgood cliché

in high school yearbooks, in moms’ reassuring words

to their bullied kids, Hallmark cards, Rod McKuen,

that kindly middle school English teacher …

But then, as in what goes around comes around

in a country built on clichés, where words change

meaning in a New York minute, a black man

got elected president in 2008, and some nettled Tea

Partyers, not guests at an afternoon pinky lifting affair,

got their camo knickers in a twist, whereupon

snowflakes became the go-to word for weaklings,

elitist twits whining about dumbass anti-American things

like clean air, clean water, clean elections, equal treatment

under heaven for women, gays, blacks, migrants, oh

Christ, you know, the unpatriotic litany of the wretched

refuse, all demanding their godless God-given due …

but then yikes! in a Roget’s oxymoron for the ages

starting in 2016, those flinty Tea Partyers lifted their pinkies

and turned into delicate snowflakes themselves, thin-skinned

supplicants cowering before a draft dodging antichrist, afraid

of books, free choice, masks, too timid to admit who we are,

what mortal sins we’ve committed in the name of God,

Country, Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism,

the 2nd Amendment, White Supremacy, Fox News, a flurry

of snowflakes lifting their savior off his painful bone spurs,

please oh please Massa, please save us from those bullies

in man buns, flouncing breasts, accents, big noses, thick lips

… they’re trying to bury us in an avalanche of decency

             —SL, June 2024, New Paltz, NY