II: Lilacs Blooming

Part II of Saisons du Coeur

for Grace

It starts as sudden rhapsody,
This shoot of brilliant change,
Transmuting in alchemic fever
Supposition, hope, fear, all our groundwork
Until even our own minds
Are alien and fresh and opened, briefly,
To each blow or severing
Or soft caress.

Oh, the tender danger of it:
Shooting through the new-wet warming soil,
New-exposed, new-softened by this cruel month;
Heads striving towards the heavens,
Yearning upward, ever upward,
As a dream yearns upward,
As the sparks of Autumn’s fires,
Ever upward…


Last month, we were blanketed,
Content, in our forgetfulness,
To sleep away our brief allotment.
Sweet enough, for us, to hide,
As we did inside boring barren branching…
As though seeds need never sprout,
Nor flowers bloom, nor apples fall,
Nor words be writ or spoken.

Soon enough, this too shall pass—
And trade our tender blue for hardy green:
Less gaudy, less ecstatic, more serene
And sensible than this prolific nova.
We will sleep again, in time,
And each year’s shifting seasons
Will remark us different in each repetition
Until our final fading.

Lilacs make a fine and pleasant sight, but shelter is advisable; it may be warmer than you’d like, but the mosquitoes can’t survive in here, so why not