Fifty-One Words for Snow

by Mark O’Flynn

It’s Australia for God’s sake.
Here are the swimming cozies,
the varieties of sauce,
but where is the mythical snow?
Out there on the mulga
chilling the champers
for the opal miners, that’s where.
The way they talk the deserts
should be full of it. Occurs only
once in a pinkish moon, if then.
Weighs the branches down to breaking point.
Do we really see ourselves as a skiing nation?
A land of snowmen in white
bowling cricket balls of hail.
Ski-jump girls like upside down helicopters.
The slippery images slide
like loose gravel, an old cardigan
with holes in the elbows, a tipsy
uncle with a carrot for a nose,
like panthers left behind
by American soldiers
to run wild after the war.
All good means of describing snow,
its aftermath, its myth,
its place in the national interest
how like everyone else
we aspire to be.

Mark O’Flynn’s novel The Last Days of Ava Langdon (UQP) was short listed for the Miles Franklin Award, 2017, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award as well as winning the Voss Literary Award, 2017. His most recent collection of poetry is Einstein’s Brain (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022).