The poet and writer Mary Snell splits her time between a Maine lake and a Greek island. In this poem, she returns to the Portland neighborhood of her youth and gives us a winter scene. This is not the bucolic winter woods filling up with snow – it’s a kid bombing down an icy city street on a sled.

A poem doesn’t have to give us the whole story. In this case, we have four straightforward sentences that make a little home movie in words. There is a shift in the way the speaker sees the brother, and that is what makes this a poem. In the first line, he is compared to a famous general, but by the end he is about to realize how limited his knowledge is.

There is danger here – he is “too young to know the law / about his body in motion” – but it’s outside the frame of the poem. We hope for the best for the boy, the speaker’s brother, but in this poem he’s forever sliding down a city street in the winter dusk.

Laws of Motion

By Mary Snell

Like Napoleon of Libbytown

my brother stood at the top

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of Bristol Street commanding us

to make way, yield the slope

for his launch down the un-sanded

right side of our dead end street,

its icy slope thick as Greenland.

We little kids lurched to the sides,

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tumbled in the snow banks, fell

up to our hips, boots askew –

tipped-over tulips in our yellow

and pink parkas. With a jolt back,

then forward, he threw himself

and the sled in the air, landed on it

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as the runners hit hard. He was

too young to know the law

about his body in motion,

or fear the force that would stop it,

so steered for the twin trees,

his goal posts in the white dusk.

Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2016 Mary Snell. It appears here by permission of the author.


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