• far and wee

    in Just-
    spring……….when the world is mud-
    luscious the little lame balloonman

    whistles…..far…….and wee

    and eddyandbill come
    running from marbles and
    piracies and it\’s
    spring

    when the world is puddle-wonderful

    the queer
    old baloonman whistles
    far…….and……..wee
    and bettyandisbel come dancing

    from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

    it\’s
    spring
    and
    the
    goat-footed
    balloonman…….whistles
    far
    and
    wee

    Spring is slowly raising her head here in Sussex. She\’s a bit out of sorts this year, having been lulled by the easy rhythm of previous years, she allowed her hedonistic half brother, Winter, to seduce her into complacency and allowed him to run riot. She is just now opening a bleary eye and pushing up some tentative crocus, whereas, by now, the daffodils are usually in full bloom.

    But where Winter is simply an opportunistic conniver here, in New York he is an absolute bully, beating down his frail sister with frozen fist, spreading his cold carnage over the land with malicious glee. In Upstate, Spring is a time of disappointment and false hope. Winter, the brute, teases Spring with the occasional peek into the world and sometimes allows her to place a tentative foot on the earth only to beat her back with the blizzard bat.

    And when spring finally does escape his cold grasp, she can\’t frolic about the countryside in lazy abandon, instead, she bursts upon the landscape in a riot of color, because she knows her time is short. She has scant weeks between that happy day when Winter loses his icy grip on her and before she is lost in Summer\’s hot, humid and bug-ridden embrace. So she doesn\’t amble, she whirls like a dervish, spreading herself across the land until the earth explodes in color.

    It makes for a vivid few weeks, a time of tulips and blue bells, when the air is fresh and the world is mud-luscious.

    It usually happens around the last week of April.

    But wherever you are, spring will arrive eventually. So I\’ll close now with that promise, offered in another poem by e e cummings:

    O sweet spontaneous
    earth how often have
    the
    doting
    ……..fingers of
    prurient philosophers pinched
    and
    poked

    thee
    ,has the naughty thumb
    of science prodded
    thy

    …….beauty…….. how
    often have religions taken
    thee upon their scraggy knees
    squeezing and

    buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
    gods
    ………….(but
    true

    to the incomparable
    couch of death thy
    rhythmic
    lover

    ………….thou answerest

    them only with

    …………………spring)