Category: Spring 2024

Until I heard your trilling notes
floating through my kitchen windows,
(which are opened
for the first time this year,
and oh, how sweet the breeze!)
and followed the sound to you,
so glad in the budding branches,
I had no idea that a tiny sparrow’s heart
could hold such joy.

Spring beauties cover the hillside now,
hundreds and hundreds of them,
closing in the rain, opening in joy
when the sunshine bursts through
the endless banks of cloud.
I found this tiny troupe of them
In the moss today, dancing
for an audience of speedwells
in an overture for spring
whose melody reached to
the very center of my heart,
filling it with the One Song,
Yes.

This is the grand spring rush, the tumbling of waters
down from the hills, fast and glad, pouring the catch
of rivulets, creeks and streams down, down, down
to the great river, miles below, bringing food
for the beaver and fishes, feeding the brush
and the trees that line the banks, clearing debris
from winter, pushing it ashore. And oh, the song of it!
A purposeful roar, smooth and determined, rolling on
for days. Down. Down. Down.

Look at you. After all that rain,
that soggy soil, the sunless gray
day after day, there you are,
little one, bright and laughing
as if you just woke up in paradise.

Patches of blue peeked through the clouds
in mid-morning, disappeared, appeared again.
I watched the dance. As the hour neared
when the eclipse would be at its peak here,
a hundred miles east of the totality, the air,
moist and warm, grew still. Somewhere
across the valley, a dog gave a single bark.
No traffic passed on the road below. Birds
were silent. I watched as color evaporated
from everything around me, fading light
turning even the sky’s blue spaces gray.
The trees and I stood together watching,
feeling the immensity of it, feeling lucky
somehow to be observing such a thing.
Why, just look at the way the clouds magnify
the remaining visible light! Isn’t that a sight!

While you wait for the waters to recede
and for the emergence of green,
I will continue to dance for you.
I will continue to sing.
‘Though there be snowflakes,
And ‘though there be rain,
spring’s stage is set, and soon
she’ll raise her curtain. Until then,
I will continue to dance for you.
I will continue to sing.

Because the trees, bless them, are withholding their leaves,
the honeyed sun pours itself into the creek,
and all the minnows and tadpoles wiggle in its warmth.
By the time the leaves are grown, so will they be.
Still, along the banks, the brush is taking on green
and wild flowers peek through last year’s carpet.
The stream, fed by recent snow and rain, is full
and rushing, and the smooth rocks beneath it
feel its motion and hear its song. At last, it is springtime,
and here, in the creek’s world, every living thing
is glad.

I croon to you each morning
in soft, low tones, “wooo-oooo-oooo,”
not, as some suppose, from grief—
far be it—but to ease you gently
from your web of dreams
into the dawning day.
Float into its light simply,
and let its radiance bathe
your heart with peace.

What fastidious detail in each of these spring flowers!
How can there not be a Who behind their being?
Such beauty! And eyes to behold it, and minds
to wonder, and hearts to understand.
All this, every bit exquisite, each detail,
from a tender grape hyacinth out beyond
the farthest star. And to think that all of it
is but one flash-like fleck eternally riding on
radiating waves amidst a brilliance of flashes,
world upon world upon world. Why, you can’t
even see its beginning, or its end! So I ask,
how can there not be a Who?
When all this wonder dances in endless joy
through every molecule of being and through
all the spaces beyond, and between, and within,
how can there not be a Who?

If you go to the woods between raindrops in spring
you will find an assortment of green growing things
that surpasses what you had imagined.
But there it is, a green world rising,
the earth’s winter dreams coming to life
right before your very eyes.