Part of my Feb 2024 Dream Poems project.
I started with a poem I wrote in 2015, titled Shadow of Spring, and I almost completely rewrote it today, and retitled it.
Vernal Equinox
In the first place,
dates aren’t solid.
A calendar can take you only
so far. A map as well.
There’s data and there’s your life lived,
a certain green or mud or birdsong that
awakens, life and lush seeping,
rasping like a distant blackbird returned
year after year to a waiting wetland.
You’ve been sleeping, a safe sleep, dreams
layered and sinking like a murky
muck, like sodden marshes
that welcome the emanations and
brook their own quickening.
You’re arriving, light and warmth reviving,
last-year’s thirsty grasses your shadow,
a comfort or a menace, it’s not yet known
and still you’re waking, disoriented, adrift in the
continuum, and that feels like a place to delve,
to dig, to sink a shovel.
Sleep swamps your veins, a slow
suspicion, but time is moving
and you are in a place
where you feel moved by time,
though you are quite still.
The light and warmth remind you,
the energy of sun and soil saturate
your winter eyes, and like a diver in reverse
you surface into this resurrected world
already risen, already drowned.
© M Wms 2015/2024
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