Gerry Stewart’s “Snow Geese” turns migration into something close to instinctive wonder. The speaker follows the birds as they cross winter skies with “soft wings” and an unshakeable sense of direction, their cries cutting through moonlit nights. What comes through most strongly is admiration: the geese seem driven by a “heartbeat” of pure determination to survive, leaving black northern skies and frozen lakes behind for warmer, rum-soaked coasts. The mood is cold, bright, and a little wild—stars, snow, screams, and the baleful eye of winter all give the flight a mythic edge. Then spring shifts the poem toward rebirth. The urge to return north is felt “beneath the skin,” as if it answers something deep and physical. In the end, the geese represent a life cycle of leaving and returning, an instinct that feels both ancient and renewing.
Snow Geese — Summary
When geese venture forth they have an innate sense of direction. Soft wings straddle stars stroking snow flaked skies with certainty.
There is a heartbeat coursing the air with life, a determination to survive, to reach the sun, to shrug off winter's baleful eye.
That is why they scythe moon slivered nights with screams, leaving black northern skies, and crystal lakes, for rum soaked seas.
In spring, a beckoning beneath the skin, to answer the call of the great white north the instinct to return, to be reborn.