The End of the Drought

Today's prompt was "a sound". Being a piper, my mind naturally went to that deep, elemental drone of bagpipes. But I figure the pipes are a good back up subject, and besides, it is too easy to go over the top with rhapsodical praise of the Great Instrument. And then I remembered a morning not too long ago, when the snow started melting, and there were little shorebirds wandering in the meadow rather than by the lake, with the worried-sounding little Killdear, calling from out of the grass and dry wildflowers of last year. So I wrote about that instead.

The Marsh, March 2017

The Marsh is flooded

And the well-known ways

Are rivers now, impassible.

The sound of water is everywhere.

Drought has vanished

Like a dream.

Where once was meadow

The Wood Ducks play

In waves of water and of grass.

The sky reflects a thousand times.

Cloud are racing

In every stream.

The Killdeer from shoreline

Far have strayed

And keen amid the willow breaks.

The Marsh gives back the plaintive sound

Of their crying

Spring! Spring! Spring!

Early Spring

I am constitutionally predisposed to cool weather. I love autumn and winter, but more to the point, I am comfortable in them. I dislike summer quite intensely, as heat and I are not simpatico. I have, however, a complicated relationship with spring. I do not like early spring time. There is mud, and snow mold, and always the scattered detritus of humanity, which is somehow everywhere now that the snow is gone, even though there was no sign of it before winter came. After winter's chill and enchanted glory, I find it all quite demoralising. But once that bleak period between the white beauty, and wild flower time is past, and we have spring properly - all bright, green grass and gentle sun.... well, in that small margin of time, before the summer heat comes and the words is still soft and cool and alive, then I love spring almost as much as autumn.

We were supposed to write a beginning, or an ending poem today. Or, if you were really ambitious, you could write a beginning-and-an-end poem. I drew a blank most of the day, mostly on account of a poem I have been working on intermittently for months, which is a beginning sort of poem, but still has that one transitional line that will not come out the way I want, and is therefore holding up the rest of it. I ended up setting for a poem about this time of year:

 The In Between Time

Winter is passing

   And burning away

Snow lingers only

   Where shadows lay.

In the bright morning

   I mourn for the loss

Of needle ice

   And white hoarfrost.

But the smell of Spring

   And Blackbirds’ call;

The tiny greeness,

   Impossibly small

The willows budding

   And snow-melt rills

Soothe my winter-heart:

   There is beauty still.

Spring Snow

This is what I saw outside my window when I woke up this morning:

My neck of the woods is having a cool, wet spring. I think I am the only person left who is still delighted every time it snows, which it has been doing every few days for weeks now. You'd think I would be used to it, but I am not. I keep taking those warm days of false spring between cold fronts for the real thing, so each little snow storm takes me by surprise.