undefended:
in the cold rain
their snow fort

Tom Clausen (1951- ). From “Frogpond” Issue 20:1, Spring 1997. Haiku Society of America, USA.

A snow fort stands abandoned in cold rain — the very weather that will destroy it. The colon after “undefended” creates a pause before revealing what’s vulnerable: not the children who built it, but the fort itself.

The irony cuts deep. A fort exists solely to defend its occupants — but only when they’re inside it, needing protection. Empty, it has no purpose, no reason to withstand attack. The children have gone inside to escape the cold rain, abandoning the structure built to shelter them. Now it faces alone what no amount of defensive design can withstand.

“Cold rain” does specific work here. Not spring rain promising renewal, but the bitter rain of winter’s end — the weather that erases snow, that turns play into slush. The fort that might have withstood snowballs cannot withstand this.

There’s poignancy in “their” — this belongs to specific children, now warm inside while their creation dissolves. What took hours to build succumbs to rain in hours. The impermanence is absolute, and the fort faces it alone, undefended, stripped of the very purpose that justified its existence.

Selected and commented on by Dhugal J. Lindsay