The March Equinox: Signs of Spring (or Fall)

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AT Equinox--Spring or Fall-- What touches your heart?

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Here are the simple facts of the March equinox:  

• Day and night are of equal length. 
• In 2025, the March equinox will be on Thursday, March 20.
• The March equinox may be taken to mark the beginning of astronomical spring in the Northern Hemisphere and astronomical autumn in the Southern Hemisphere.  (Wiki)   

beyond the facts, we  note signs of the seasons, and how they resonate in our hearts.  What ideas emerge?

Below are two poems about spring that I love.  In the poem "Spring," look at how the bear wakes Mary Oliver's narrator to the question "How to love the world?" The bear's interaction with the world seems to Mary Oliver to be "perfect love."  In Ada Limon's "Instructions on not Giving Up," the "greening of the trees"  symbolizes resistance, a "continuous living" despite what the winter does.  (Notice that both poems have fists in them!)

Choose something from spring--or if you're in the southern hemisphere, you might want to choose something from fall.  

Make a poem that brings the season (or an idea the season evokes) alive. 

Spring by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

 

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Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limon

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

❤❤❤

Please link one poem that is your response to this prompt.  

After you link your poem, please visit others,

and

Don't forget to include this link in your post.