Tag: William Carlos Williams

An Etheree on the Arrival of Spring

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Laura Purdie Salas Here. Thank you, Laura, for hosting.

I love watching the season transform. I’m sure I’m not alone. So, I appreciated the Poetry Sisters inviting all of us to write a poem this month, an etheree, on their ongoing theme for 2023, of transformation.

Who are the Poetry Sister’s? Find their names Here on a post by Mary Lee Hahn.

What is the poetry form called “ethheree?” This link has the info in case you aren’t familiar or you’d like a review.

Winter rallied, like a dying diva at the end of an opera, and re-established it’s hold on Central New York this week with the recent nor’easter storm on 3/14/23.

Central New York, outside my door 3/14/23, quiet and still.

But spring IS coming, because it’s what happens slowly in March in Central New York.

The day following the storm, March 15, winter seemed to be tip-toeing away as if it could escape notice.

March 15, 2023, the sound of dripping trees outside. 
TODAY, MARCH 15 

Change
happened,
winter-paced,
slow as hedgehogs.
Wind coaxed snow off trees.
Ice melted in sunlight.
I saw daffodils rally
deep in soil beneath last year’s leaves, 
(in my mind's eye, from experience)
to conjure yellow blossoms, about now. 

© Janice Scully 2023

The change of season and nature is a popular topic for poets, as one would expect. I opened THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS and discovered this short lovely poem. 

LOCUST TREE IN FLOWER
By William Carlos Williams 1935

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch 
come

white 
sweet
May

again.

I think the word “again” at the end adds great impact. It does, it seems, because it underlies the miracle of the natural cycles here on earth. Spring happens again and again. The old and stiff branch bears flowers again.

Thank you for hosting, Laura Purdie Salas. Happy Spring!

Last Minute Haiku

Welcome to Poetry Friday, the coming of Spring edition. Heidi Mordhorst, at My Juicy Little Universe, is hosting HERE. Be sure to stop by to see what poems she is sharing this week.

Spring is coming to Central New York and everything seems imbued with new hope. They are lowering the age for vaccines and people are lining up. I don’t think it’s too wishful to believe that as time goes on more and more people everwhere will agree to take it.

Today, I waited for a LaMiPoFri to come to me as I stared out my living room window at the early spring colors, mostly brown, but some green. I noticed my husband left a ladder by the porch.


MARCH RITUAL

Wood ladder among

the hemlocks and melting snow–

Christmas lights come down.

©Janice Scully 2021

Then another was inspired by old dry leaves that never fell.

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Dry crispy leaves shake

in spring — as xylems hoist sap

upward to new buds.

©Janice Scully 2021

THE BOTTICELLIAN TREES, by William Carlos Williams, provides images of trees changing in spring. Trees/ alphabet metaphor to me was unusual. It’s a lovely poem. Below is the beginning, and the rest HERE

THE BOTTICELLIAN TREES

The Alphabet of 
the trees

is fading in the
song of the leaves

the crossing
bars of the thin

letters that spelled
winter

and the cold
have been illuminated

with 
pointed green

by the rain and sun--

I hope everyone is well and enjoying the first days of spring, at least they are the first days in Central New York.

A small tree in my front yard