Rick Leddy

Spring Song

 

A girl in the swirling mist

Wearing a weather-inappropriate

Yellow cotton dress

And heavy brown wing-tip shoes

Sings silent blissful karaoke

To the weeping sky

Her eyes closed

Her lips moving to

The chorus of youth

The vibration of it

Surrounds her with sunshine

A beacon burning

Through the bleak morning

I wonder what she hears in the

White earphones

What moves her to ecstatic reverie

It is a song I heard once

But no more

The lyrics lost as the years erased the notes

She sways like a sapling

Unafraid of the wind

She is music

Her every movement a counterpoint

To my forgotten youth

She is a hymn to spring

So lovely in the rain

Singing silently

 

 

Spring has sprung

Yet another cycle recycled
The equinox has opened up
to the expression of flowers and weeds —
verdant bandits of every imaginable size and color
Chlorophyll fountains spawning unbeckoned and unwanted
in cracks and crevices
Spring is wild and against my will
A willful child demanding its own way
Its never-ending tantrums of sheer stubbornness
unfolding in unscripted explosions
So I sigh
With grudging admiration at the tenacity
of our world
Where life demands to be heard
whether we like the words or not
It is everywhere and everything
And we are part of it
So I will be a weed whisperer
Speaking to my fellow travelers in muted tones
I may not like you
And I will pull you from the soil
uprooting your will to be in untold sweaty hours
I love what you represent
But, I would love you more
If only you looked and smelled more
like a rose