Spring

My friend Patti reminds us in her blog post that yesterday was the birthday of poet Billy Collins, on whom she has a giant crush that you can't blame her for. He is a brilliant and totally accessible poet who served as Poet Laureate of the U.S. 2001-2003 and has a zillion other awards to his credit. But it's more than that (I think it helps to hear him read his poetry). I've heard him on A Prairie Home Companion more than once.

Patti asks us to submit our own poem in honor of Billy's birthday, and even though I'm not "standing in [my] slippers at a granite counter with good light on ripe bananas," but merely looking out the window of my motorhome, parked in front of my sister's house in Memphis, I am inspired to submit the following:

Spring

How wonderful to be back

Where Spring is anticipated

For its flowers,

A winter-long yearning

Satisfied,

The change of seasons

Bringing daily surprises.

How can I not remember

From one Spring to the next

That the redbud tree

Sprouts flowers on its trunk?

That there is no green

Like the green

That mists the maples?

That a simple walk

In the neighborhood

Is like seeing the world

For the first time?

It is Nature's amnesia,

Otherwise my heart would break

To see it go.