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?

Primur

It's the start of the semester at the local college, always a crazy time at my house. It's crazier than usual this year because some friends who we hoped would live here in our town with us forever are suddenly forced to move away, and so added to the usual time pressure is an emotional pressure, putting us all in a cooker where we will stew until their moving day, this Saturday.

So my sense of a new beginning as fall semester starts is turned upside-down and sideways by my friends' sudden need to move. It's feeling like this kind of a beginning:

Primur

Bedder not tew admit that
the author of the pome, whos
vois has not bin perjered,
whos breth vybrates with

the phan's roteytion, whos
narrashun may bee unreliabl,
hs mor to say than the vegeteble
berger sizzling ovur charcoles,

kreates altitoodes fromb which
to plummit fertively, sincs into
plush orange pyle, then sirfases
too inform thoes wating that

the oke leef shaches, that won
centence is not the biginning.

I'm trying to take comfort from the sound of the last line. That the seeming prison sentence ("you must move away") is not the beginning of a new and very bad chapter, but merely the end of something. Because when things end, however badly, there's always hope for starting again.

That's what I wish for my friends--enough hope to start again. It's easy to get crushed by bad circumstances, and they've had more than their share. It's hard to keep hoping. Sometime you have to do it anyway, even when the world doesn't seem to make much sense...when it's past the season for cookouts and swimming and everything pleasant.