St. Thomas and Snow Globes

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas.  For those of you who want a more theological post on this day, head to this post on my theology blog, where you'll also find a poem.  It's a much more formal poem than I usually write.

I've had snow globes on the brain since I read this post on Dave Bonta's Via Negativa blog.  His poem has an ecological focus; I've been thinking of the other ways a snow globe could be used symbolically.  I've also been thinking of several snow globes that we have from my husband's childhood--but when we got them, all the water had left.  Was there a leak?  Did the water simply evaporate through the years?

Now those snow globes were the tiny, cheap, plastic kind, not the fancy glass kind that so many people collect.  Still, it made me think about how change comes even the world that we assume to be unchanging, unaffected, closed-loop systems.

I haven't come up with a good title yet.  You might suggest "Drained," but I've already published a poem with that title.  I'd welcome any suggestions you have for a title, or for making the poem stronger.

Inside the snow globe,
children play for hours
without getting soggy and cold.

Inside the snow globe,
the hot chocolate never cools,
and dinner is always almost ready.

Inside the snow globe,
fathers don't leave, and dogs
don't die, and bedtime comes late.

But all snow globes leak
eventually, and we find them drained
of life when we clean out the house.