Rambling in Early March

A walk in the woods yesterday prompted me to craft a poem, something I rarely do nowadays. In younger days I wrote more poems, before work and life seemed to get too busy for inspiration to squeeze in. Then, like any trade unpracticed, both skill and impetus simply diminished. But now and then I try to recapture the practice and set down an image or an idea. This was one of those moments.

Listening to Trees

What passed for winter could not resist

The wooded warmth today as I walked

Uphill and then across the ridge as though

It was already spring and not early March.

Fall’s littered leaves clung, like tattered paper,

To branches, fluttering in the winsome wind

Like early butterflies, harbingers of a green

Haze, the buds soon to be seen as distant mist.

On the tamped mud path I trod alone, almost,

Passed once by a man and his dog, and then

A young runner in red shorts, legs pumping

In time to the ratatatat of slender trunks

Swaying and clacking like claves tuning up.

Spring’s gig. A woodpecker laughed up high.

Geese on the lake below hawked the sunlight

That thrilled the deep blue water, their voices

Clear as street vendors in old times, the age

When the oldest trees were saplings, older

Even than I am, now renewed by these woods

Whispering promises of bright tomorrows.