After such a long winter

meditation, love poem, 03.21.21

It is not quite Spring — nights still cold,
ground still matted and brown, trees still bare,
though they wear now the faint scruff of buds,
blur of texture against a slick slab of blue sky.

Evening comes, gentle, taking its time,
and we stand outside, leaning into each other,
scanning treetops, searching the robin singing his sunset song:

there he is, high up, silhouette of unabashed praise.

And we’re both crying a little, I think, my husband and me,
and we both know why without saying,
because what else is there to do, after the last year
or five, sniffling there under the fading light and incoming clouds,
a few drops of rain falling now,
the rising smell of warming earth and leaf decay and
maybe maybe the quiet hint of bloom and buzz.

I know it’s the spring after this one winter, he says,
still staring at the robin, his voice hushed because this is church,
but it also feels like the spring after an impossible stretch of darkness,
spring after years of winter.

I know just what he means: the bare astonishment
of standing under a sprinkling sky,
of a light that lingers,
of a robin that came back,
of, somehow, a thousand tiny green unseen possibilities,
of the simple fact that we made it.