April is National Poetry Month. You wouldn’t know it. It’s also spring. That’s clear from all the flowers. The trees are sprouting buds growing new leaves, and the birds and bees are busy making babies. Building nests, getting ready for summer. This year there’s a pallor growing. A dark foreboding of trouble yet to come. When it comes, it’ll be too late to fix it. A transition from the past. The old ways are overdone and burned out. The ancient forms no longer hold up. History is repeating as it is erased. The new direction brings transformative changes. Poetry is what happens when nothing else can. In honor and recognition of April and poetry, I offer a poem to spring, and its glorious arrival.
Springy Zing Thing
Crocuses are croaking
Bullfrogs serenade
The grass is greener
Birds build nests
Jealous of airplanes
Butterflies flutter
Bugs are bugging
Reborn against
The stillbirth
Of winter’s
cold rebuke
The light of day
Shining in
nights dark requiem
to the heartache
The exquisite pain
Of becoming
Once again gone
Like springtime in April, it’s always that way. Corny poetry? Perhaps. There are exceptions to the rule, but not much variation on the theme of the four seasons. There’s no rhyme where the poem ends, and the story begins to sing a song of rebirth. As a young kid, I watched the changes in the weather and how predictable it can be. It felt like torrential rain, or it feels like it might. The storms run out of water as winter snow melts away. To regrow the landscape and regroup the natural order of things. No time or purpose can change the course. A silly poem about spring, written on the wind. It floats away like puffy clouds, and the people who enter in and exit out of your experience. Funny how life works, like seasons change and the weather doesn’t care. In a tropical climate, it’s always sunny summer, but there’s frozen tundra elsewhere. Closer to the north and south poles, far from the equator, there isn’t much fair weather.
Terra firma becomes my favorite home for life on this shaky rock. A bouncy ball in orbit, spinning around the universe of timelessness. The ethereal gossamer wings of golden galaxies and the perfect backdrop for the endless universes of stars that may collide. No poetry is sufficient to explain the machinations of our place in the slop of time and space. It’s somewhere between here and there and no place at all. The great mystery of life will be the death of us all. There’s a way out of this spiral into madness and misery.
Spring’s a time of rebirth. Poets love to wax poetic about it. Spring spreads joy around despair in spite of itself. A particular way of seeing reality. Clapping back to the abyss is a shift in what we perceive to be real. Or is it the imagination running wild? The discarded refuse and selfish desires of a civilization gone amok. Spring is coming. Edgar Allan Poe’s last words, Lord, help my poor soul. That’s a tall order for a man who famously said, I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. If only he could’ve loved spring a bit more, maybe he wouldn’t have been so dark and gloomy.
The birth of spring gives voice to all the beauty missing in those other seasons. Summer’s too hot. Winter’s cold. The fall’s the end of something. Not the best analogy for poetry or the poets who write it. Walt Whitman called spring Daisy Time. Spring has sprung, though there’s still a chill in the air. Hope springs eternal. It’s suspect at the very least. The season I love best is a concept of what’s believed to arrive sooner or later.
The grass doesn’t need permission to grow. Birds have no worries. Flowers don’t know how good they smell. It’s our unique observations of the world that make it so. It’s the imaginings of our own undoing. It can’t be altered or manipulated, although we try. In vain attempts to control that which controls us. If the weather can be controlled through artificial means, then why can’t it be spring every day?
