Sierra’s Winter-Spring Season

As George Harrison wrote, “It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter.”  But tiny violets in the grass, and returning song-birds, along with the sun at last prevailing and the moon swooning in clearer skies, and with the Daphne Odora sweetening the air beside the kitchen door, all that hard work and pointless worry of winter streams away with the new, fresh rain.

So as not to condemn winter with the seductive splendor of spring, one can certainly see that it was winter that renewed one’s appreciation for living, growing life.  It was the alchemy of winter that, in its stark crucible, reclaimed the essence of delight back from the accumulating dross of indifference.

The following poem is to help celebrate this moment on the great rotating zodiac of nature’s time.

It’s late winter
moving swiftly toward spring,
while purple violets
twinkle in the grass

as hoards of mushrooms
revel in our
torrents of rain,

and a bush of irises
flourishes beside
the leafless fig.

Wild turkeys gossip
amongst themselves, passing
across the barely green fields.

Bands of hungry deer
drift through stealthfully
seeking the first tender shoots.

Some days, the sun does battle
in a streaming sky behind
smokey swirls of cloud,

Winds cast winter’s detritus
against rusting fences and
glistening black tires sunk in the sod.

Westward, this evening sky
runs with water-color pink
as gray shadows pull back

from the brilliant blue,
and stars faintly appear
with whispered promise
of a sun-blessed dawn.

-kevin trammel