A Wintry Drifter-Seeker

Since I didn't want to post something diary-like yet, here is a poem written between university classes this spring.

Likely the first two lines quote a different poem, in fact they are 99% likely to have been plagiarized from better verse, but I can't remember which particular poem has suffered larceny. Anyway, these twin lines of course refer to etymology — that 'planet' comes from the Greek planáw — to wander.

***

O snowflake, wanderer of the skies
and planet of minute domain,
o wayfarer of tiring tries
at thwarting past the windowpane.
   Seek outside your place to stay,
   From our hearth stray far away.

O winter's chill, from airloft borne,
and casketed within the soil —
snowflake, this shall be your bourne,
the aim and tombment of your toil.
  Seek in earth your place to stay,
  For heaven hath compelled away.

O shivering branch and snivelling bud,
withhold far up the pillowed streaks;
beneath the snowflake mires in mud,
but you shall keep it from the creeks.
   Some seek in branch their place to stay
   Until they melt and drip away.

O glass-eyed sky and clouded lord —
Urane, who art wintering —
from within the heavens' ward
with hail and snowdrift lingering,
    Seek for each flake some place to stay
    And speed it briskly on its way.

***

Regardless that this isn't a poem I particularly admire, and in the end I didn't try anything really new with it, I did think it was a stimulating though airy-fairy challenge, in theory, to bring together ancient ideas of the cosmos, and poetic conventions, with modern scientific models and the tendency to atheism. In modern verse I think there isn't so much suspension of disbelief (except, perhaps, the precedented disbelief that even the inceptor knows what meaning, or lack thereof, lies in his rime), which is fairly impoverishing.