WinterSpring, A Kind of Love
There's no other poem to share after a weekend like we've had, spring snow and all, but the following by Charles Simic:
Dear Spring
by Charles Simic
Will you please hurry with your preparations?
We are freezing up north as you procrastinate
Like a rich lady with too many gorgeous outfits
To choose from, spending hours in front of
A mirror, trying them on and unable to decide,
While we trudge to the mailbox through wind
And snow, extract our unwilling fingers
From a glove to check if there’s a letter
From you, or just a bitty postcard, saying:
I’m leaving Carolina today, hurrying your way
With my new wardrobe of flowers and birds.
The tease! I bet she starts and forgets one of her
Hand-painted silk fans and has to go back,
While we stamp our feet and wipe our noses here,
Worrying the wood for the stove is running out,
The snow on the roof will bring the house down.
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Though our wardrobe of fancy flowers is a long way off in Edmonton, the weekend was full of birds. When the snow finally subsided, our front tree was full of robins. I've never seen so many robins in one tree.
And who is to say the elegant lady, Spring, doesn't also have this fluffy white cocktail dress that she throws on for special occasions? It's real enough.
Still, we will learn patience. We will wait for Spring to come down the spiral staircase. We will sip our greyhounds, our pinot grigio.
The Patience
by Pat Schneider
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
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It is a kind of love, too, when the branches, at the end of a long winter, bear yet one more snowfall. It is a kind of love when the vine lets the snow have one last clinging.
And we, too, learn patience, waiting for green leaves, and blossoms. Other awakenings.
“A waiting person is a patient person", says Henri Nouwen. "The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.”
And I feel this way about winter. That we must see it through, we must live it to the full. We must drink the last drops of it, so that when spring comes, we understand the wild glory of it.
