Happy 1st Day of the Wild Season

spring arrives at 5:58 pm in the Northern Hemisphere, so we've been in it for an hour!

 

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THE WILD SEASON

 

soft gentle spring, innocent as

Blake’s lamb,

I reject you.

 

No! you are

not spring – you, pretty and

pink, idolized by poet, lover, and,

shamefully, gardener who should know

and love better… you are the sham, the

idealized, the wished for. And because you

are the long-awaited, you become

Messiah.

 

Who are you, then, Spring, if you are not a

reflection of my image? … an externalization

of my hopes? … if you are not merely

light and goodness and shades of green?

 

Ah Spring, good numen, divine mind of Cicero, remote, tough,

wild, I joined my childhood with you on the habitually brutal northern

prairie. and in the month of March, the only wheatfields were

heaving snow, piling into drifts along the grid. The only light

spring gave us was a gradual increment into the ability to

see our way home from school… “don’t get lost on the way

home, kids; be ever so careful if there’s a snowstorm. they’re

worse in the dark.”

 

Spring is not the lamb. No, Spring is the Madonna travailing in

grips of outrageous labour to give birth to the liberator, only to

know her beloved will die when the sun succumbs to the early

horizon.

 

Praise the gods of northern climes!

while farmers parade in combines, and feed the

Spring Madonna reeking manure.

by June the grain will be planted with

prayers for gold and enough harvest to fill

the belly of the lonely, ageing silo, the god of

traintracks and humble

prosperity.

 

[eep ©]

Done