Month: March 2019

Impatient Spring

In early March as aging Winter
denies the inevitable thaw
it feels soft and hopeful one day
hard and relentless the next
and I find myself counting back
the preceding months of slate skies
and skeletal trees, the dirty snow
so far gone it’s hard to recall
how bright it was in December
when string lights and holiday hearths
made the icy windows feel festive
but that was an eternity ago
before winter hunkered down
settling its heavy bones into the Earth
content to stay awhile, and now?

March won’t yield fast enough
I’m afraid that this will be the year
spring doesn’t come

Winter’s Last Days

I shouldn’t hate March, but I do.
This trickster of months promises spring,
then takes it away

dumping another eighteen inches
of thick, sticky snow
like clumps of brown sugar onto overburdened branches

I shouldn’t hate March,
except two days after winter, at last, retreated
while spring, newly born, hung back,
she died.

The weak winter sun was her last
The sky, a slab of concrete,
the trees, skeletal, ashen
the world colorless

March’s dull eyes had not yet found their shine
The frost, lingering, painted everything

white as death

I do hate March, I do
For wrestling the season away from winter
For pulling the sun close,
so it could thaw the frozen ground,
but not until after she sighed her last breath,
not until then!

She died, cheated of the first Magnolia blooms
Cheated, when March painted the dormant grass green
and coaxed the apple trees
into an explosion of buds.

Each crocus, each daffodil, the color that blossomed to life
even as she faded from it—were a mockery.

March has branded everything she lost
into my soul.
Its long days of deprivation are situated
too close to abundance.

I do hate March, I do