“Finding Summer” by V.P. Loggins

When it fell it fell overnight

and I woke that morning  

in wonder at the cotton-light 

whiteness masking everything.

But then came another thought, 

like a punishment I deserved, 

for as the morning hours turned,

the snowstorm coming to an end,

I saw the obligation to clear 

the porch’s steps of snow 

the sidewalk’s carapace of ice.

Dragging on my coat, my hat,

my insulating gloves, I found 

once more how heavy the cotton-

light mask of beauty can be. 

A trio of men, gray-haired 

like me, died that morning

with shovels in their hands,

their wives having said be careful. 

Was it divinity, as Hamlet says,

or something else that shaped

their ends? How can we know? 

But I escaped the fridged grip

of death, holding in my mind

the gift of beauty and wonder, 

as if they were my life savers,

with an unexpected weight. 

And I was grateful for my life,

yet my heart began to break

like ice underfoot, grew as heavy 

as the heft of fallen snow, for men 

whose hearts had failed them.

When I returned to the soft security

of our home, removed my coat, 

my hat, the protection of my gloves,

your hand felt as warm as summer.

V. P. Loggins is the author of The Wild Severance (2021), winner of the 26th Annual Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition, The Green Cup (2017), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Book Prize, The Fourth Paradise (Editor’s Select Poetry Series, Main Street Rag 2010), and Heaven Changes (Pudding House Chapbook Series 2007). A Lively Mask, winner of the 2025 Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award from Codhill Press, is forthcoming. He has also published one book on Shakespeare, The Life of Our Design, and he is co-author of another, Shakespeare’s Deliberate Art. His poems and articles have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Chiron Review, Crannog (Ireland), The Dalhousie Review (Canada), The Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review and Willow Review, among others. He holds a doctorate in English Renaissance literature and has taught at several institutions, including Purdue University and the United States Naval Academy.