Dunn: 'The Same Cold'

 I’ve read the warnings about confusing poetry with news. But sometimes the news makes you read a poem in a different way. Here’s the beginning of Stephen Dunn’s “The Same Cold”:

In Minnesota the serious cold arrived

like no cold I’d previously experienced,

an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity

that always took me by surprise.

On blizzardly nights with wires down

or in the dead-battery dawn

the cold made good neighbors of us all,

made us moral because we might need

something moral in return, no hitchhiker

left on the road, not even some frozen

strange-looking turned away

from the door.

 

Dunn told how his car broke down when it was 30-below. He was saved by “a man with a candy bar and blanket,/ a man for all weather.”

 

It was no big thing to him, the savior.

Just two men, he said, in the same cold.

 

• Source: Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, p. 61-2.

Note to reader who somehow finds this 50 years later: In January 2026, people in Minneapolis were protesting the inhumane treatment of immigrants and people suspected of being immigrants. The response of the then-president of the United States was to flood the city with poorly trained, undisciplined agents who killed people.