Poem

In Bruegel’s white Massacre of the Innocents,
snow famously has fallen
to hide the babies brutally taken
by Herod’s henchmen. The horrified
mothers cringe at the irreligious snow
and the substituted still-lifes
as troopers trample the village square.
But Pieter, even with that hard-boiled Flemish eye,
granted a reprieve before
the scene was salved by another hand.
Why else those two uncomfortable trees
counter-attacking with pikes of new growth
and sheltering in the hollow of their grief
three swipes of blue busy with rebirth?

Please select the link to the painting for a close-up look at this painting (at the Google Art Project). See if you can find where a later owner had the "harsher" elements of the painting painted over with "snow." Also, can you identify my two allusions to poems by William Carlos Williams and Dylan Thomas?