A compass needle, a lizard, spins half a turn
To keep me in sight, tweaking my sense of direction:
Spring is coming — that way.
According to my 2010 turtle calendar, the Vernal Equinox arrives Saturday, March 20. To celebrate spring’s arrival last year, WIZ ran a Spring Poetry Run-off that turned out to be lots of fun. [...]
The poplar’s shadow on her hand
Indicates a tree in spring.
Willets, catbirds, and broncos all hear
Big-hipped nature dancing across the Rockies
Stripping and putting on the many faces of
A weather-beaten land:
Green, red, brown, and white,
The flag of summer on the horizon.
They are indivisible incompatibles,
This landscape and
The mutterings of a middle woman.
Her words lie naked in a field,
Lost [...]
by William Blake
Sound the flute!
Now it’s mute!
Bird’s delight,
Day and night,
Nightingale,
In the dale,
Lark in sky,
Merrily,
Merrily merrily, to welcome in the year.
Little boy,
Full of joy;
Little girl,
Sweet and small;
Cock does crow,
So do you;
Merry voice,
Infant noise;
Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year.
Little lamb,
Here I am;
Come and lick
My white neck;
Let me pull
Your soft wool;
Let me kiss
Your soft face;
Merrily, merrily, to [...]
by Jim Cobabe
The hour of dawn my rest I broke too soon,
too soon the ever faithful sunrise failed.
Stormy weather ruled this day ’til noon,
though on other daybreaks sunny hope I hailed.
Through long and dreary winter days I bide,
and though I long to sleep in bed, depressed
beneath warm flood of down I seek to hide,
duty to [...]
by theric jepson
Worm on the sidewalk
as the sun comes out—
How did they miss him?
How’d he escape breakfast?
A gentle flick to the
dirt under a bush,
and walk on.
May he survive.
To find more theric, sift here.
by greenfrog
Fall’s day-stars now gleam
Through leafing willow twigs. Spent
Bud-shells crunch on Path.
Cross-posted at In Limine: On the threshold, at the beginning.
by P. G. Karamesines
Mountains and evening: aspen leaves
Pale as moth wings,
Reclaiming the wood.
The car clove spring.
A flock of yellow petals, heads hung—
I wanted to stop,
But seeing you, said nothing.
You were not much in your face,
Your words, better remembering
Some breathtaken childhood
On this exalted road.
On the peaks, winds blew
Clouds to dust
In parching cold.
We rode through green flush [...]
10 May 2008
by Tyler Chadwick
I wish I knew the names
of all these birds: I’m sure that’s a sparrow,
wings wound tight against the wind,
dropping to the tip of a cypress
before re-mounting the sky; and
two more there, circling the birdfeeder,
vying for seed. And there, a robin, breast flared
even at this hour,
sifting the xeriscape for a meal,
prouding its [...]
by D. H. Lawrence
This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and [...]
by P. G. Karamesines
Like swallows, each one shapes its path
On the other’s—two horses, maybe yearlings,
So alike in color and conformation
My eye exchanges them as they run.
It’s what they are together my eye
Singles out: twins of movement.
They stop and box the air between them,
Swinging skulls like stiff-armed fists.
They roll apes’ lips to shake formidable
Teeth and lift [...]