In Ndrek Gjini’s tiny fable, a year becomes an old man. The title, “A Tale for Children About Snow,” promises something like a bedtime explanation, and the poem keeps that promise by turning the weather into a character. When Year grows old, its hair grows gray and white. Then Wind arrives with “giant scissors” and begins to shear it off. The central idea is not just that snow resembles white hair. It is that seasonal change can be understood as a living body aging and being tended. Winter, the poem suggests, is not an abstract coldness; it is the shorn hair of time itself, falling over the world.
The construction is as compact as a riddle or a joke. Two four-line stanzas set up a premise and then deliver a redefinition. The first stanza introduces Year and Wind with capital letters, as though they were proper names in a folk tale. The opening lines are short and plain: “When Year grows old / its hair grows gray and white.” That plainness gives the thought the quiet weight of age. The next line lengthens as the Wind enters: “Then Wind picks up its giant scissors / and begins to shear it off.” The longer line and the adjective “giant” enlarge the scale, moving from a small image of hair to a force that can cut across an entire season. The poem does not rely on regular rhyme; instead, it uses echo and alliteration. The w sound in “white wool,” “Wind,” and “winter” creates a hushed, breathy texture, like snow itself settling.
The second stanza shifts into a more intimate storytelling voice. “So, as I told you many times before” is the cadence of an adult repeating a familiar tale to a child, and it places the poem inside a relationship rather than a lecture. The sentence then unfurls across the stanza, delaying its main point. “The white wool which during the winter / covers everything is not snow -” pauses at the dash, and that pause works like a drumbeat before the reveal: “it’s the shorn white hair of the old year.” The poem defines snow through a negative and then a substitution: not snow, but wool. That structure is riddling, the kind of magical thinking a child can accept and an adult can still enjoy.
The imagery transforms one thing into another. Hair becomes wool, snow becomes a blanket, the year becomes a body, and the wind becomes a pair of scissors. The word “wool” is especially important because it softens the poem. Wool is not just discarded hair; it is warm, useful, something that covers and protects. If snow is wool, then winter is not a blank or hostile emptiness but a covering made from time. “Covers everything” gives the image an enveloping, almost lulling quality. Even the underlying thought—that time ages and is cut away—stays gentle rather than frightening. The old year is not destroyed; it is shorn, as a sheep is shorn, with the quiet implication that life will continue.
What makes the poem significant is its miniature myth-making. It does not explain snow scientifically or meteorologically; it explains snow narratively, the way a child might need the world to make sense. By giving the year a body and the wind a tool, it turns the calendar into a character and the coldest season into a visible trace of passing time. Every snowfall becomes evidence of an old year being groomed, and the reader is invited to see the ordinary world as a story in progress.