Today, I'm so thankful to live in New England. Yes, winters can be harsh, and summers sometimes hot. But what a panorama of seasonal change we are blessed with. Not just four seasons, but finely tuned micro-seasons, too.

Right now, it's mud-time. We're not quite as far along as what Frost describes in "Two Tramps," but will be in a week or so. Yesterday, downtown, was the first real shirtsleeve day of the spring. It's joyous. Our last foot of snow melted a great deal overnight; it now lies heavy, wet, and messy in shady locations and slushy puddles. Showing through is wet, wet clay soil with deep puddles, looking like Yoo-Hoo. It's mud-luscious! I've been waking in the morning with the chirping of songbirds the past two weeks, courting and courting. No peepers yet, though.

Cummings' poem is so happy and fun, but it also always seems to contain a creepy darkness within it, as well; perhaps just the sense that the boys and girls, now obliviously playing as children, will soon be grappling with the more complicated, slightly scary, adult desires hinted at by the 'goat-footed' balloon man.

The last stanza of the Frost one has stuck in my head since college and pretty well expresses how I always hope to choose my work.

Happy spring, buns!

These are wonderful. Thanks, Miko. :)

Thanks for these, Miko. I was just thinking of doing a series of spring poems next week with my students. I've always loved Frost's "The Pasture", too.

(Links don't seem to work on this computer, alas.)

Frost is so cool to study. His stuff is so familiar and simple-sounding, bucolic pastoral poems, on the surface. But when you start reading them hard, there is some serious business going on in there.

I almost did this very thread, almost, because the cummings came into my head last week on the appropriate day - just spring.

Then I was going to ask -I'm not really a poetry person, and I like my poetry short and catchy: cummings, D. Parker, etc. Who else might I like?

Frost is so cool to study. His stuff is so familiar and simple-sounding, bucolic pastoral poems, on the surface. But when you start reading them hard, there is some serious business going on in there.

Miko, do you like Ted Kooser? His poems are often about nature and ordinary things. He uses simple language. They're gorgeous.

Here is one that loosely fits with the Spring theme:

The Early Bird
by Ted Kooser

Still dark, and raining hard
on a cold May morning

and yet the early bird
is out there chirping,

chirping its sweet-sour
wooden-pulley notes,

pleased, it would seem,
to be given work,

hauling the heavy
bucket of dawn

up from the darkness,
note after note,

and letting us drink.

LoriFLA, thanks! I like both the Kooser poems you've posted. Seems like someone else (maybe here?) has mentioned him to me lately. Good stuff.

rainbaby, personally I'm drawing a blank. I love poetry but I'm better informed about 19th c. and early 20th c. than contemporary poetry. There are a lot of folks here who can give awesome recommendations, though. And you might like to sign up for an e-mail subscription to Garrison Kiellor's Writer's Almanac; he features good, pithy work almost every day. The last 2 links I posted were from there.

That's ok, Miko. Garrison Kiellor makes me wince. He's on the infamous List Of Things I Don't Approve Of.

I do like some other poetry - Auden, Sexton, Coleridge. . .but I'm just not going to seek out the heavy stuff.

Oh! William Blake. He fits in with cummings and Parker. Short, memorable. Anyhoo. Thanks for the springypoems!

I like Yeats. Some of his are short and extremely punchy.

Oh, and Langston Hughes, completely.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Ah, The Waiste Band.