Easter

Today is the first day of national poetry month. Here's a Sally Van Doren poem about new beginnings:

Easter

Hyacinths come first

here, forsythia close

behind. Jonquils and

daffodils sprouting

up before we are ready

to receive the light of

April. The oaks' leaves

don't yet give us cover

and the sheared air

sears the cornea.

Could we hide

in the azalea bud?

Lilies wake us. We're

singing purple.

I've been walking around with a song playing in my head for the last week or so, from the musical Dames at Sea, called "Raining in My Heart." Partly it's been because of the weather, partly because of my mood. Today, though, I'm going to try some new things.

A few years ago, when we first kept hermit crabs as pets, one of them crawled out of its shell, dug a hole, and stayed there, still and dead-looking. I left it there for a few days, and we were all surprised to find, one morning, that it had put on a new shell and was crawling around. Although we eventually took to calling all the hermit crabs "Bob" after the 15 Animals song, we called that crab the Easter crab.

It's been a long winter. I'm going to come out of my shell. How about you?