Poetry Month

April is poetry month and I can't let it escape without a poem. This is a poem appropriate for the kind of spring we have been having--"Skunk Cabbage" by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets.  You should read the whole poem but it ends

                                                   Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.
Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle
refinements, elegant and easeful, wait
to rise and flourish.
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

And sometimes what blazes the trail becomes pretty.  Remember the coltsfoot from an earlier blog?  Here they are now making their own bit of warm sunshine amid the chilly wet gloom of our spring.