Spring (2)

I noticed that a lot of poets I love have a sly spring poem or two hidden up their respective sleeves. They just can't leave it alone. Here're a few:

Ode 1

Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise
mournful candles. Sad is spring
to perpetuate, sad to trace
immortalities never changing.

Weary on the sea
for sight of land
gazing past the coming wave we
see the same wave;

drift on merciless reiteration of years;
descry no death, but spring
is everlasting
resurrection.



Basil Bunting

***

Spring Rain


Now the rain is falling, freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,

a Pacific squall started no one knows where, drawn east as the drifts of
warm air make a channel;

it moves its own way, like water or the mind,

and spills this rain passing over. The Sierras will catch it as last snow
flurries before summer, observed only by the wakened marmots at ten
thousand feet,

and we will come across it again as larkspur and penstemon sprouting
along a creek above Sonora Pass next August,

where the snowmelt will have trickled into Dead Man's Creek and the
creek spilled into the Stanislaus and the Stanislaus into the San Joaquin
and the San Joaquin into the slow salt marshes of the bay.

That's not the end of it: the gray hays of the mountains eat larkspur seeds,
which cannot propagate otherwise.

To simulate the process, you have to soak gathered seeds all night in the
acids of coffee

and then score them gently with a very sharp knife before you plant them
in the garden.

You might use what was left of the coffee we drank in Lisa's kitchen
visiting.

There were orange poppies on the table in a clear glass vase, stained
near the bottom to the color of sunrise,

the unstated theme was the blessedness of gathering and the blessing of
dispersal-

it made you glad for beauty like that, casual and intense, lastng as long
as the poppies last.



Robert Hass

***

Some haikus by Matsuo Basho:


First day of spring-
I keep thinking about
the end of autumn.




The spring we don't see-
on the back of a hand mirror
a plum tree in flower.




A village without bells-
how do they live?
spring dusk.

***

Spring

Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings,
Their children finger the awakened grass,
Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings,
And, flashing like a dangled looking-glass
Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,
The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me,
Threading my pursed-up way across the park,
An indigestible sterility.

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;

And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitious,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.


Philip Larkin

***

Haikus by Kobayashi Issa:


In spring rain
a pretty girl
yawning.




Spring rain:
a mouse is lapping
the Sumida River.

***

Spring and All


By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast - a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines -

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches -

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind -

Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf.
One by one objects are defined -
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance - Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken



William Carlos Williams

***

Some Haikus by Yosa Buson:


A moored boat;
where
did the spring go?




The end of spring
lingers
in the cherry blossoms.




Wading through it
her feet muddied
the spring current.