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. [...]
Last Friday night my son dug two of the last three holes needed to set our remaining fruit tree starts. We didn’t manage to plant any of them that night because he and my daughter needed to gather their things together for the early start they faced the next morning. They were to travel to Moab [...]
(On “Pond at Thompson’s Station” by J. Kirk Richards)
by Tyler Chadwick
The sun has been misplaced.
Or, if you’d like to get more
Biblical, it’s returned
to the dove’s abyss—or
was that Milton? I can’t be sure
as I dance so near the beginning
with words so supple they
bend into themselves until
only the landscape remains:
the field flushed white, hills
seduced into bed
by cloud [...]
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 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 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 [...]
In honor of spring’s arrival, Wilderness Interface Zone will over the next two weeks post poems celebrating the arrival of “the boyhood of the year” (Tennyson).
If you have a favorite poem about spring or one in which spring figures prominently or have written one that fits WIZ’s themes and content, e-mail it to us at wilderness@motleyvision.org. Please review [...]