Spring

Not to sound too much like a cliche, but I delight in spring and how it is like poetry. Each year, every year, the same trees I drive or walk past during the week, grow their buds and beautiful baby green leaves start to pop out. The light seems to make them shine from the inside out. Familiar fluffy pinkish-white flowers bloom on the trees and the pink petals on other trees hang on until a breeze chases them to the ground. And then there are piles of soft pink petals. Later in April the dogwood trees bloom. I love the feeling of the newness of spring—the sounds of birds starting to fill the air in the morning, the crispness of blue sky in the afternoon, and the light that is still in the sky at early night.

There is no growing weary of spring as a metaphor for new life. I am happy forsythia bursts out in wild, vivid yellow and daffodils pop open with happy faces. I love buying tulips and placing them in mason jars on my window sills. And then there are all the sheep and lambs and cows and calves I see on the green pasture land and hills of Lancaster farm land.

But I wish I could write a poem that says something new or thoughtful about spring. But nothing comes out. So to celebrate spring, here are poems I saved. They speak what I wish I could say about spring.

In April  | Rainer Maria Rilke

Again the woods are odorous, the lark
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark,
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day.

After long rainy afternoons an hour
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings
Them at the windows in a radiant shower,
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

Instructions on Not Giving Up | Ada Limon

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Christ’s Hand Reaches Out | Malcolm Muggeridge

It is precisely when every earthly hope has been explored and found wanting, when every possibility of help from earthly sources has been sought and is not forthcoming, when every recourse this world offers, moral as well as natural, has been drawn on and expended with no effect, when in the shivering cold every stick has been thrown on the fire, and in the gathering darkness every glimmer of light has finally flickered out – it is then that Christ’s hand reaches out, sure and firm, that Christ’s words bring their inexpressible comfort, that his light shines brightest, abolishing the darkness forever.

photos by me…