A flock of spring poems
April is National Poetry Month. The Home Forum celebrates with four views of nature's rebirth.
Design
Could it be snowing?
I thought between seeing
and reason:
Catkins and bud scales,
carnelian dendrites,
a blizzard of aspen flowers
Flirting and flitting
with lime-green keys:
Vibrant! Crystalline!
A deep and timeless reservoir
of consciousness and longing
came to mind
By design.
Nancy J. Wallace
Oneness
Here one is, not alone,
simply solitary.
There is a difference.
The singular crow, a beacon,
rests on a limb at the edge
of a windbreak, beyond which
his flock feeds, cawing, full of corn.
The farmer, his planter parked,
the engine of the tractor hushed,
thinks of every spring like this,
how he had seen all of them,
how by himself he was part of this,
sweet with honeysuckle that he nursed
from the bloom, breaking each blossom,
putting the nectar on his tongue,
two drops from each golden flute.
Meanwhile the crows are raucous
in the trees, keepers of the long days.
Robert Parham
Leaves
I know they're not
looking in the window,
though they appear to be,
all those maple leaves
on the trees that surround
the house. Their stretch
is just for light of course,
and yet the pointed tips
of many leaves brush the glass
with such curiosity, such
apparent interest,
that one personifies them.
I have an interest in them,
why not they in us?
Perhaps they record
somewhere in their cambium
each time we stretch or arch our brows,
and this is what tree rings are -
all their notes, taken down
in tree.
Paul O. Williams
Sunday in spring
I never noticed
the hyacinths' purple curls
until this morning
when yellow daffodils
rang their frayed bells
from collars of stars.
Each leaf,
each blade of grass
vies for attention.
Even weeds
carry tiny blossoms
to astonish us.
As bird songs collide
in the air,
my voice loses its place.
The garden keeps changing.
Every day, glossy with light,
I memorize where I live.
Marianne Poloskey
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