Hail, bright crescent, whose light wakes wrens from sleep
while grackles carry straw to build new nests:
Gently, so gently, do morning clouds weep;
though robins gather worms to crimson breasts,
some remnant of winter still clings to earth.
No leaf appears yet on long-barren oak,
but each tree stands ready for sudden birth,
and in on-rushing twilight — peepers spoke.
Was that the first cricket, singing at noon?
Is that shillouette an owl or a bat?
New wild-flowers cry, “how soon? How soon?”
Skunk cabbage spreads leaves on the marshy flat.
So much is still brown, so much is still gray…
yet new changes bubble up with each day.
This sonnet was delayed by being away from home on business. I wrote one appropriate to where I was; but it didn’t fit within the larger cycle of all the other sonnets; the weather was too far advanced relative to home. I had to come back, and do my regular walks in familiar places, before I could write this poem and have it fit with the others.
