Friday, May 4 – “I watch the spring come slow-ly”
Traveling north-south, south-north during season changing time lets trees and ground plants show their stuff to visitors. Readers from where I live in Detroit will recognize in the poem how much farther north it is in mid-Maine today. Poet Rhonda Neshama Waller offers readers to her south a taste of what down here was weeks ago — “warm sun, after a week of rain, hail, snow.” In Detroit, we’ll touch 80º over the weekend, most of our leaves have spread to full size, tulips have already blown our minds. Which part of spring is more beautiful? “Yes.”
Have a great weekend.
john sj
Today’s Post – “Spring Comes to Maine”
Sonnet May 10
Almost mid-May, I watch the spring come slow-
ly day by day, pale lime-green moving up
from Sheepscot Valley towards my mountaintop,
up here the leaves still furled. Two eagles flew,
late afternoon, just past the east window.
Today, wild violets everywhere I step,
bright golden dandelions on the slope,
warm sun, after a week of rain, hail, snow.
Remembering to match my pace to this,
to note the details of each day’s new turn,
the distant hills still patched with lavender,
deep green of fir, the changing moments pass.
For dinner I’ll have buttered fiddlehead fern,
The daffodils are opening in the grass.
Art credit: “Two adults from the local Bald Eagle family,” photograph taken August 19, 2012, near Pembroke, Maine (USA), perhaps.
{first posted May 15, 2015}
p.s. People who live where I do have noticed my gait looking bad. Sometimes strangers ask me some version of “can I help you?” and carry my stuff, humbling and touching. Finally, yesterday I met a hip surgeon who looked at my x-rays & showed me the x-ray from ten years ago when we replaced my left hip (at that time zero cartilage and growing bone spurs). Surgery worked wonders. He compared that 10 year x-ray with today’s. Same thing, zero cartilage bone-on-bone. He asked “why did you wait so long?” Good question. At any rate, the first open date we found is June 20. I’ll have to miss some travel which is important to me but imagining the absence of chronic pain smells good to me even at this distance.
p.p.s. Leigh Star, a soul friend who died too young, wrote me this blessing the day after hip surgery # 1. I miss her.
“I will think of your body gladly giving up this pain and accepting a stranger into its midst, learning to live with its new ways.”
January 9, 2008
Leigh Star 1954-2010
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Leigh_Star