Someone used to say
That spring begins and ends
Like a transient midday breeze

When the colour of the tulip fades
To an old pale yellow
You, grown out of your sorrow
Will stand ahead of the horizon
Ready to live, ready to breathe

Don’t disappear.
Not today.
The humidity is too low,
The vibration of baby insects hums along the ground
Surely you hear them.
Tomorrow it will still be springtime
And the day after that.

You can’t disappear, you’ll miss the fireflies and the August lilies
You’ll miss the homemade garden salsas and the baskets of eggplants and basil and sweet peppers
You’ll miss the crunchiest leaves under your shoes
The feeling of warmth after cold
The November moon.

Don’t disappear,
The wide world needs witnessing
And you’re the only one with your eyes to witness it.

It's been snowing last
Night, golden leaves of Autumn
Cover the once-green grass,
Hiding the Summer days.
Button-up, little lady,
It is time to go into hiding.

Do we all need a season,
Of hiding? Cocooning? Intimacy
With our Creator? To be remade without hesitation
A squall of geese squawks
Overhead, moving on...

With Mother Nature.

I wonder—
do the trees feel empty in winter,
like abandoned cathedrals with hollowed arches,
their prayers carried off by wind?
Do they mourn the once-gold choir of leaves,
or do they wait—
hands lifted in quiet faith,
hope braided into their roots
like a forgotten hymn?

Does the moon know she is not always whole?
That we love her in pieces—
when she is a shard of silver,
a lost earring in the sky.
Does she ache, too,
a lantern adrift in a sea of indifference,
admired but never held?

There is beauty, I think,
in what is missing—
in the pause before bloom,
in the ache of becoming.
The tree, the moon—
they teach us how to stay
even when we are not full.

Maybe they know.
Maybe they don’t.
But still—they remain.
And maybe that is enough.

There was a
snowball fight.
A ****** nose.
A forgotten glove.
The evidence now
under a blanket
of white. Only
partial footprints
remain. Soon they
too will be gone.

Spring comes
And I find myself fond of fall.
Summer dawns
And I admire more winter.
Fall arrives
And I cherish spring newly.
Winter blossoms
And I appreciate summer more clearly.

jocular hack of a day
sideways   and flinty with snow
the winds dictate  the true streets of this city
turbine life outside  is in retreat or insurance
sing in the sunny pleasure
let the weather match celebration
beast of spring forgive
our lustless plunder and dumbing
quake us from our numb standard
ferry us

it’s easy to miss the juncos’ slow, sudden departure in spring;
messengers from colder warming worlds

they arrive a dulling autumn:
peppering notations of life in a landscape encased,
each deep dark demitasse
brewed on increasingly tardy dawns
painting a night sky inverted

standing ankle deep in first snows
searching for leftover springs beneath the detritus

but then they finally emerge with the warblers,
orioles, robins, and buntings

and pointillism fades beneath impressionist palettes
that flash over treetops and underbrush

but the last juncos linger:
quiet familiar trills outside my window each morning
disrupting stillness till it disappears