This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up, and the flickering, watery rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, these sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.

~ D.H. Lawrence






Spring

Spring is a natural resurrection, an experience in immortality
~ Henry David Thoreau




Vain Strivings Tied


I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.

A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.

A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.

And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.

Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.

But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life’s vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.

That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.

~ HENRY DAVID THOREAU





the eternal seductiveness of life



The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life


Jean Giraudoux




sakura


the cure for
this raucous world…
late cherry blossoms

Kobayashi Issa (1789)



Spring Pools




These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods –
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

~ Robert Frost (1928)





When the Rose is Faded




When the rose is faded,
Memory may still dwell on
Her beauty shadowed,
And the sweet smell gone.

That vanishing loveliness,
That burdening breath,
No bond of life hath then,
Nor grief of death.

‘Tis the immortal thought
Whose passion still
Makes the changing
The unchangeable.

Oh, thus thy beauty,
Loveliest on earth to me,
Dark with no sorrow, shines
And burns, with thee.

~ Walter de la Mare





Snow on the farm

So with the stretch of the white road before me,
Shining snowcrystals rainbowed by the sun,
Fields that are white, stained with long, cool, blue shadows,
Strong with the strength of my horse as we run.
Joy in the touch of the wind and the sunlight!
Joy! With the vigorous earth I am one.
- Amy Lowell, A Winter Ride




Meaning



Any man that walks the mead
In bud, or blade, or bloom, may find
A meaning suited to his mind.

~Alfred Lord Tennyson



The Tree Of Scarlet Berries



The rain gullies the garden paths
And tinkles on the broad sides of grass blades.
A tree, at the end of my arm, is hazy with mist.
Even so, I can see that it has red berries,
A scarlet fruit,
Filmed over with moisture.
It seems as though the rain,
Dripping from it,
Should be tinged with colour.
I desire the berries,
But, in the mist, I only scratch my hand on the thorns.
Probably, too, they are bitter.


~ Amy Lowell (from Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, 1914)





Forest Shadows

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

 ~ Victor Hugo




Thaw



To think to know the country and now know
The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten million silver lizards out of snow!
As often as I’ve seen it done before
I can’t pretend to tell the way it’s done.
It looks as if some magic of the sun
Lifted the rug that bred them on the floor
And the light breaking on them made them run.
But if I though to stop the wet stampede,
And caught one silver lizard by the tail,
And put my foot on one without avail,
And threw myself wet-elbowed and wet-kneed
In front of twenty others’ wriggling speed,–
In the confusion of them all aglitter,
And birds that joined in the excited fun
By doubling and redoubling song and twitter,
I have no doubt I’d end by holding none.

It takes the moon for this. The sun’s a wizard
By all I tell; but so’s the moon a witch.
From the high west she makes a gentle cast
And suddenly, without a jerk or twitch,
She has her speel on every single lizard.
I fancied when I looked at six o’clock
The swarm still ran and scuttled just as fast.
The moon was waiting for her chill effect.
I looked at nine: the swarm was turned to rock
In every lifelike posture of the swarm,
Transfixed on mountain slopes almost erect.
Across each other and side by side they lay.
The spell that so could hold them as they were
Was wrought through trees without a breath of storm
To make a leaf, if there had been one, stir.
One lizard at the end of every ray.
The thought of my attempting such a stray!

~ A Hillside Thaw. Robert Frost


close inspection

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf,

and take an insect view of its plain.
~Henry David Thoreau

Pomegranate: Immortality; multiplicity in unity; perennial fertility; fecundity; plenty.


Pomegranate: Immortality; multiplicity in unity; perennial fertility; fecundity; plenty.
Buddhist: One of the Three Blessed Fruits, with the citrus and peach.
Chinese: Abundance; fertility; posterity; numerous and virtuous offspring; a happy future.
Christian: Eternal life; spiritual fecundity; the Church, the seeds being the numerous members.
Greco-Roman: Spring; rejuvenation; immortality; fertility; emblem of Hera/Juno and of Ceres and

Persephone as the periodic return of Spring and fertility to the earth. It is also the plant which grew

from the blood of Dionysos.
Hebrew: Regeneration; fertility.

— J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols, Thames and Hudson, London, 1978, p. 134

if i love You



if i love You
(thickness means
worlds inhabited by roamingly
stern bright faeries
if you love
me) distance is mind carefully
luminous with innumerable gnomes
Of complete dream

if we love each (shyly)
other, what clouds do or Silently
Flowers resembles beauty
less than our breathing

~ ee cummings



The Door



Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye
or the picture
of a picture. (…)
Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking
even if there’s only
the hollow wind
even if
nothing
is there
go and open the door.
At least
there’ll be
a draught.

~ Miroslav Holub (“The door”, Jdi a otevri dvere, 1962)






Maybe if I listen closely to the rocks
Next time, I’ll hear something, if not
A word, perhaps the faint beginning
of a syllable.

~ Phoebe Hanson


Petra, Jordan



It seems no work of Man’s creative hand,

by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned;

But from the rock as if by magic grown,

eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!

Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,

where erst Athena held her rites divine;

Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,

that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;

But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,

that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;

The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,

which Man deemed old two thousand years ago,

match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,

a rose-red city half as old as time.

~ Petra (John William Burgon)



snowy scene



Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft and slow
Descends the snow.
~ Snow-Flakes (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)