Poetry Thursday — Springtime
Whenever spring comes flickering through the land, and winding up my legs and through my stomach, shreds of poems I only partly know jiggle suggestively in my brain (although at this time of year, my brain is generally open to suggestion).Oh to be in England, now that April’s here… Spring is sprung, the grass is riz. I wonder where dem boidies is?.. Sweet lovers love the spring… Nothing is so beautiful as spring… April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring/dull roots with spring rain… In spring when the world is mudlucious… Nature’s first green is gold… Wordsworth’s bloody host of golden daffodils…
I actually like the Eliot best and I love the Robert Frost poem but today I stubbornly do not want to think about how nothing gold stays. Right now I want to scoop all the golden wonder of plant and person and world into my arms and kiss it and smell it and drown in it and have it run down my chin like peach juice. Memory and desire indeed. Give them to me both.
Spring Rain
Sara TeasdaleI thought I had forgotten,
But it all came back again
To-night with the first spring thunder
In a rush of rain.I remembered a darkened doorway
Where we stood while the storm swept by,
Thunder gripping the earth
And lightning scrawled on the sky.The passing motor busses swayed,
For the street was a river of rain,
Lashed into little golden waves
In the lamp light’s stain.With the wild spring rain and thunder
My heart was wild and gay;
Your eyes said more to me that night
Than your lips would ever say. . . .I thought I had forgotten,
But it all came back again
To-night with the first spring thunder
In a rush of rain.
Ah, Teasdale.
Lovely. Thank You.
“But it all came back again/To-night with the first spring thunder/In a rush of rain.” I have been there, when memories flood our senses, and sometimes it is merely a scent that provokes it.