Harbingers of Spring


Hope quickens with the lengthening of days.

I can feel it. It's been brilliantly sunny the last few days, and warm enough to melt a lot of that deep snow that had built up into hard-pack ice. I almost took my bike out on Sunday, except with all that melting snow there would be so much slush to ride through in the streets. The main thing, the big surprise (or so it always seems) is that it's still light at 5 p.m. Even at 6 now. The days lengthen, and even though there is sure to be more snow before the flowers start to bloom, hope quickens.

That's one reason I stay in the "snow belt." Spring feels different after a long, hard winter. The emotions called forth by the harbingers of spring after months of bleak, gray/white days are so powerful. Though the snow remains, the heart lifts, knowing ... soon all will change.

As I wrote 20 years ago in my poem, "First Iowa Spring":

Green. I did not know green
before. California year-round
greens pale
against the greens following upon
the sensory deprivation of an
Iowa winter, and
the flowers shock
against the memory
of white.

Even this gray drizzly day
cannot stop my heart.
I sing with birds
I've never heard
before.

In City Park a lone
Oriental woman walks near
the River
up the hill
slowly.
Suddenly she breaks
into a run
arms stretched to the sky.

She stops,
looks around
feeling a bit foolish I guess,
then dances as if to say
let them laugh!

Posted: Tue - February 24, 2004 at 09:24 AM          

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