Dylan Thomas
from A Child's Christmas in Wales
Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannelpetticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smeltlike Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, theEnglish and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode thedaft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.
But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. Imade a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.""But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, itcame shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snowgrew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls andsettled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."
