Poetry, throughout the centuries, has covered an array of topics, including nature, love, science fiction, and so many more that there's too many to count. But my favorite poetry topic of all is Spring, so here are ten of my favorites:
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.
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Shea Ward
