A Poem for March

Did I say that I would write a blogpost once a week this year?

Did I sign up to teach (full-time!) for four weeks?

It isn’t looking much like it around here, but it really is March and my birthday month. So here’s a poem by Bellingham poet Luci Shaw. It appeared on The Writer’s Almanac on March 5, 2012, and I found it while searching for an access code in my sent-mail folder at work. (Pointlessly, I might add.)

Revival

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old believer, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened
for months, fogs layering their slow,
complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,

but as the light lengthens, preacher

of good news,
evangelizing leaves and branches,
his large gestures beckon green
out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting
from the cotoneasters. A single bee
finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow
aconites glowing, low to the ground like
little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up
a purple hand here, there, as I stand on my doorstep,
my own face drinking in heat
and light like a bud welcoming resurrection,
and my hand up, too, ready to sign on
for conversion.

-Luci Shaw

I love so much of this poem that it’s a little hard to single anything out. But calling the earth an “old believer,” and the light, a “preacher of good news,” just warms my heart.

Talk to you next week. I hope you write!