A Moveable Garden

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