Last remnants of shabby snowmen
Sit, discontentedly morose,
Marooned in oceans of green grass
Once stolid, solid sentinels
Have lost their stern authority
But did they ever have much gravitas,
Hastily dragooned into being
By inexperienced ice-numbed hands?
These grubby effigies never assumed
Much more than caricatures
Of mock-respectability
Muffled up in shabby, surplus scarves.
With pebble-toothed, skewed, gaping grins,
They grimace at sheer folly
Of the frost-dazed, snow-crazed youth
Who impudently dare suggest that
Wind-stripped sticks of broken branch
Could serve as useful working hands.
If these grey gargoyles could but craft themselves
What stylish statues they might have been,
Of such design that Michelangelo
Would spectacularly fail to emulate;
Instead they merely drip and tremble,
Subjugated by the tyrant thaw,
Their failing powers diminished by the hour
Until their last ice-crystal melts
And they are ghosts once more
In memories of gleeful children
And breath of cloud-strewn sky.

C Richard Miles

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/melting-snowmen/