Cold White Death

It was an evil Saturday in February
When an unprecedented snow squall
Struck the North, turbulent and furious,
Unlike any other storm of winter.

Two fliers, a man sixty, a man of thirty,
Doctors in a private aircraft,
Seventy miles away on a mercy mission,
Rose, it is thought, into the dark gale.

Hysteria ran through the hometown,
Hope grew as help mobilized belief,
All the wits of a thousand men
Searched five hundred miles of earth,

White, deadly, cold, and implacable,
With scores of aircraft and helicopters,
Each following fast each hectic tale,
Men determined to rescue the fallen.

On the third day it was nervously acclaimed
A plane had been sighted in the snow.
When the mothering helicopter hovered low
It reported only a mass of shadow.

When spring came a lone flier
Spotted the wreckage accidentally.
The fliers had lived four days without food,
Heard the death rattle of planes overhead,

Wrote their history sealed in bottles,
Made snowshoes of branches and Scotch tape;
The older wrote “I have no hope”;
Found, perhaps, some time for meditation.

When their bodies were brought out and up
On the stiff skis of a helicopter,
High in air, and headed south,
That was a resurrection of the caught.

Their voice, scared away in the snow,
Their love, muffled in the air,
Their hope is living in the sky,
They belong with old enigma now.