Children, It's Spring by Mary Oliver

And this is the lady

whom everyone loves,

Ms. Violet

in her purple gown

or, on special occasions,

a dress the color

of sunlight. She sits

in the mossy weeds and waits

to be noticed.

She loves dampness.

She loves attention.

She loves especially

to be picked by careful fingers,

young fingers, entranced

by what has happened

to the world.

We, the older ones,

call it Spring,

and we have been through it

many times.

But there is still nothing

Like the children bringing home

such happiness

in their small hands.

Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing

Flowers.

Risk by Anais Nin

And then the day came,

when the risk to remain tight

in a bud

was more painful

than the risk

it took

to blossom

After the Winter by Claude McKay

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves

And against the morning's white

The shivering birds beneath the eaves

Have sheltered for the night,

We'll turn our faces southward, love,

Toward the summer isle

Where bamboos spire the shafted grove

And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill

Where towers the cotton tree,

And leaps the laughing crystal rill,

And works the droning bee.

And we will build a cottage there

Beside an open glade,

With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,

And ferns that never fade.

Today by Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

So uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.

The Enkindled Spring by D.H. Lawrence

This spring as it comes burst up in bonfires green,

Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled

bushes,

Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between

Where the wood fumes up and the watery,

flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration

Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze

Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,

Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among

This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is

tossed

About like a shadow buffeted in the throng

Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

Wildflowers by Ellis Nightingale

There are butterflies here.

Watch how they dance

From wildflower to wildflower in a nectar-fuelled trance.

Fluttering, flitting, lightly they live.in

Oh, what I wouldn't give

To have wings and think only of

Wildflowers.

A Prayer in Spring by Robert Frost

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;

And make us happy in the happy bees,

The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,

The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,

And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,

The which it is reserved for God above

To sanctify to what far ends He will,

But which it only needs that we fulfil.

To Spring by Roger Greenwald

Dreaded season when light's too long too soon.

winter turns to you before its work is done.

Along with snowdrops. Forsythia. Anemone.

along with tulips breaking out of their bulbs.

comes the long memory of the fatal spring

when I was thirty-three and my love wasn't there

had gone without waiting and said she'd return.

but winter's work done. was still gone.

Absence stronger than flowers. Steaming in sun.

poisoned the season. Buried morbid winter

And filled imagined summer with vapors. Light.

light spring drifts in like a feather

used for torture. Its touch

too much and not enough.

Cut Lillies by Noah Warren

More than a hundred dollars of them.

It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them

in.

Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner

of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my

dining table--

each fresh-faced, extending its delicately veined leaves

into the crush. Didn't I watch

children shuffle strictly in line, cradle

candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers,

chanting Latin-just to fashion Sevilla's Easter? Wasn't I sad?

Didn't I use to

go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage raising

bursting violet spears? --Look, the afternoon dies

as night begins in the heart of the lillies and smokes up

their fluted throats until it fills the room

and my lights have to be not switched on.

And in close darkness the aroma grows so sweet,

so strong, that it could slice me open. It does.

I know I'm not the only whose life is a conditional clause

hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room

and the tremble of my phone.

I'm not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen

flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind.

When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for

decades.

God, I am so transparent.

So light.