Poem
Spring, Belatedly
Easter Sunday amidst the pandemic, April 2020.
(After reading a collection of poems about the arrival of spring, I wrote this on Easter Sunday 2020. A cento for a pandemic. The works and words referenced are by George Orwell, Emily Dickinson, Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy.)
It takes many days into April before
we concede Spring’s been forsworn.
She bemoans coming in early, only
to be shunned to the corm of the crocus
while plangent clocks strike thirteen.
She camped on the Madison Isthmus,
near where the Yahara River
opens to a patient Lake Mendota.
Spring comes on the World
skating like Joni Mitchell
on crow’s wings before the thaw,
while boys down south,
stirred by tradition, nimble,
are stealing bases jugando pelota.
Absent the raucous parades of March,
Spring hears ice moaning, a mourning
usually reserved for November. She cautions:
the pink and yellow blossoms we missed
is sustenance that can’t be reclaimed.
Teetering, I counter: on this Easter,
the blackbird will not have an audience,
the avenues will be empty, void of hats.
I don’t say, we long for the solstice.
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