Late snow usually feels like an insult from the calendar. Dave Bonta's "Onion snow" treats it as a delivery instead. In nine short lines, a surprise March storm turns into a pantry shelf, and walking through the woods becomes a way of opening the jars.
The title seems to borrow a folk name for a late-season snowfall, and the poem gives the phrase extra work. An onion is a thing of layers, and so is this landscape: white over brown, and brown over whatever is waiting underneath. The poem's real action is peeling, though it only arrives in the final stanza.
The form is plain. There are three tercets, no rhyme and no fixed meter, just short lines that sit close to speech. The grammar is more inventive than it first looks. The first two stanzas make a single sentence, and the dash after "trees" lets it spill over the stanza break, as if the wind has pushed it sideways too. Then a semicolon splits the sentence into two halves, matching the split view it describes: "the woods are white; / in the other, brown." The punctuation acts out the geometry. The last stanza is a separate sentence, and the full stop gives the turn its weight.
The imagery is concrete and economical. "Wet" is the key adjective in the opening, because wet snow is the kind that clings. It plasters itself to things, which is why it can later stick to boots. "Sideways" makes the snow something thrown rather than fallen. Judging by the lines that follow, the trunks are coated on the windward side only, so what you see depends on where you stand. The poem doesn't settle whether the woods are winter or spring. Its two colour words, "white" and "brown," have no decoration, and that restraint lets the contrast speak for itself.
The sound shifts along with the sense. The first stanza is soft and hushing, full of w and s sounds in "winds," "wet snow" and "sideways." The second is flat and quick. In the third, the consonants thicken: "sticks," "boot soles." You can almost hear the clogging. Then the line "lifting like lids" releases the pressure with its liquid l sounds, and its rhythm briefly lilts, LIFT-ing like LIDS. The final line, "from jars full of spring," is made of open, easy sounds and ends on a stressed "spring," the word the poem has withheld until the very end.
The simile carries the poem. It can be read two ways. The clumps of snow on the soles might look like lids, or each step might lift a lid of snow off the ground. In both readings the woods become the jars. Jars suggest preserving, a season put up for later and kept sealed. That is a domestic, human-sized picture, and it sits oddly against the wind and the weather of the opening. "Full of" adds generosity: the jars hold plenty. Notice too the word "our." The first stanza is impersonal, all wind and trees, but people arrive in the third. Their boots do the opening. Spring isn't simply waiting to be revealed; it gets unsealed by walking through it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it changes with one comparison. Without the last three lines, it is a neat piece of weather-watching: snow on one side of the trees, bare bark on the other. With them, the cold turns into anticipation. The storm is no longer winter's last grip but a lid, and lids are made to be lifted. The poem never states this as a lesson. It is compact enough to recall haiku in its attention to a single moment, but it ventures a bolder figure than most such miniatures do. It lets the reader feel what the speaker feels, that under the slush and the mess, spring is already there in the jars.