The Snowflakes Sail Gently Down

"The Snowflakes Sail Gently Down" is a poem by Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara. It contemplates its speaker's feelings on having left Africa and its culture.

The snow flakes sail gently
down from the misty eye of the sky
and fall lightly lightly on the

winter-weary elms. And the branches,
winter-striped and nude, slowly
with the weight of the weightless snow
bow like grief-stricken mourners
as white funeral cloth is slowly
unrolled over deathless earth.
And dead sleep stealthily from the
heater rose and closed my eyes with
the touch of silk cotton of water falling.

Then I dreamed a dream
in my dead sleep. But I dreamed
not of earth dying and elms a vigil
keeping. I dreamed of birds, black
birds flying in my inside, nesting
and hatching on oil palms bearing suns
for fruits and with roots denting the
uprooter's spades. And I dreamed the
uprooters tired and limp, leaning on my roots –
their abandoned roots –
and the oil palms gave them each a sun.
But on their palms
they balanced the blinding orbs
and frowned with schisms on their
brows – for the suns reached not
the brightness of gold!

Then I awoke. I awoke
to the silently falling snow
and bent-backed elms bowing and
swaying to the winter wind like
white-robed Moslems salaaming at evening
prayer, and the earth lying inscrutable
like the face of a god in a shrine.