life as a forsythia blossom

a poem for spring

Good morning, muses,

today I’m actually going to read something that I wrote this past week on the first morning of spring. (I’ll note for those of you reading that I have very little experience in punctuating poetry, so I thank you for your indulgence.)

The first morning of spring, and even though you’d already walked the dog, you couldn’t yet bear to sit in front of the computer or wash last night’s dishes.

The wisps of pink sunrise clouds were beckoning to you.

You shook the grogginess from your bones,

took the stairs one by one,

back out into the chill,

back out across the tiny front yard,

Witness to the birds and their exultation

Morning commuters rushed past in their shiny metal cages,

but you leaned against the Birch and watched the underbellies of seagulls turn pink, reflecting the Sun

More gulls than you have seen in this neighborhood since you moved here,

and their presence felt like a reminder precisely for you,

an invitation to remember the

Vastness of the Ocean in the midst of your own small Tuesday morning concerns

The way the gulls reflect the Sun, and the reality that all these commuters were driving by without noticing, made your heart break just a little.

Certain friends came into this life with memories of past lives,

memories of being a human on another patch of the globe,

but you have no memories of a life before this one.

Instead, you carry this longing, this desire for coordinated movement:

the starlings that shoot in arrow formation from the pine;

the pigeons that coordinate their spiral dance almost every morning, soaring from the rooftop across the street in grand figure eights before resting again;

the way the buds on the Forsythia all emerge at the same pace, or a pace

ever so modestly varied;

the way each tree, each humble shrub prepares itself with shoots or buds,

There is in you that same readying:

a quality of energy, an alert knowing that is on the cusp of blossom.

Perhaps in past lives you were a gull or starling,

perhaps you were a single forsythia blossom, short lived and spectacularly yellow,

perhaps you learned what it felt like to burst into blossom on a particular day in spring alongside thousand others on the same riotous shrub.

Perhaps it happened in an era when people did not soar down the streets in metal contraptions,

Perhaps many paused to stare at your glory on a day in spring, and the gulls were singing their harsh and eager sunrise song.

So do not blame the commuters,

(of course you have been one of them and shall be again)

but wish for each of them one life as a forsythia blossom, or a gull:

A brief life, perhaps, but unforgettable,

that lodges in the crevices of their soul and manifests in their next human life as

a longing not to miss sunrise,

a desire to linger,

a yearning to witness the beauty of this unfolding and singular world.