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// January 14 [Longfellow] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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January 14

Mister Longfellow is very much like Mister Whitman, but I kinda like Longfellow a bit more. Leaves of Grass was very nice to read, but it was a bit long for a poem. Although there are some poets who like to write epic poems that are as long as a story, and those are nice for winter days.

That's more of an earth pony thing, though. A lot of them don't have much to do in the wintertime, because all the crops are in and the days are short.

Anyways, today in class we read two different poems. The first one was about him shooting an arrow into the air. Humans don't have to be as careful about that, because there aren't any flying humans that they could hit by mistake.

It's kind of a metaphor, though. He's talking about how he doesn't really know where the things he says go. Words have a power beyond just their appearance on the page or the sounds that they make in the air, and you don't always know just how far they'll go. Like, one of my cousins (sorta distant, and I don't really know her but my dam says she's my cousin) got inspired by something one of the Wonderbolts said and is now a personal guard to Princess Celestia. I think it was Spitfire who said it, but I don't know what it was.

I guess I kind of got inspired by hearing about how Princess Twilight had discovered a whole new world of people, and just thinking of the possibilities of it . . . I started to read everything I could about it, and now here I am! So maybe Princess Twilight's arrow wound up (unintentionally) lodged in my breast.

It's funny sometimes to think about how one thing leads to another, and when you're in the present, you don't really consider it. Right now, I'm sitting in my room writing in my journal by my little silver desk lamp with the bendy neck while Peggy is still sleeping. She's so cute when she sleeps.

There had been a special meeting at school, and once we were all in the school coliseum, our headmistress stepped up to the podium and announced that Princess Twilight had found a new world. There was a moment of dead silence as it sank in, and then there was all sorts of cheering and I remember all I was thinking about at the time was if Stormbreaker liked me or not. Turns out it was 'not.'

It was only later that it sunk in, and then I started reading everything about this new world I could get my hooves on, and—

Well, anyway, the point is that now I'm here, and I never could have imagined the chain of circumstances that led up to this point.

The second poem we read was The Wreck of the Hesperus. I think Professor Hillberry chose it because of the ice storm. It made it easier to imagine the struggle.

People were struggling this morning. There was a glittering coat of ice on everything. It was beautiful to see, and no bother to me at all, but humans were moving slowly and falling down a lot. I hadn't really thought about how much of a hinderance having only two legs must be. Sometimes I see Peggy or the other students writing or doing other clever stuff with their hands while I have to clumsily poke at my computer's buttonboard whenever it doesn't listen to my voice, and I get a bit jealous. I wasn't jealous this morning. For walking around on the ice, four legs is better.

A couple of my friends were playing around this morning. Well, it kind of started out after breakfast. Christine and I went out of the dining hall together, and she saw that I was flying above the ground while her feet were slipping on the ice. She wondered if it would be possible for me to pull her along on the sidewalk, and I thought that sounded like it would be interesting, so she grabbed my tail and I pulled her behind me all the way to the Olds-Upton building.

Then Aric and another friend called Meghan who I knew from Equestrian class and he knew her from bell choir (I don't know what that is, but that's what he said) with Aric saw how much fun we were having and had to join in. I flew slow, because they had trouble staying on their feet at first, then sped up when they got used to it.

Pretty soon I'd zipped a bunch of my friends around campus like that and even a few other people who I didn't really know that thought it looked like we were having fun.

I was kind of curious if I could actually lift any of them up, but the rules say I'm not supposed to carry any passengers when I fly, so I didn't. I don't think dragging them along the ground counts as flying, although perhaps I should ask Mister Mark to be sure. I don't want to break any rules.

After poetry class, I was hoping that we could play some more, but the college workers—who are collectively called Fac Man—had put down salt that melted all the ice. Some of their sidewalks have steam-filled tunnels under them and didn't need any salt at all to make the ice melt.

By the afternoon, the sun had come out and the temperature was rising, so all the ice on the trees melted,. Everybody seemed to like it better, but I missed the ice and the bejeweled world it had given us, at least briefly.

Weather is like that. It's an arrow or a song that we give to other ponies, and then they make the most of it. Whether it's sticking their tongue out to capture a fat snowflake, or sitting in their living room with their family listening to the rain drum off their roof, or the gleeful shouts when they see fresh snowfall, we sing our song and know not where it lands.