SPRING EQUINOX POEM

Equinox

Equinox

The rising of the green.
Hidden like the hollow place in the eagle's bone
the mountain valley, held, still dark, dripping with winter.
Held like a basket of reaching stark limbs, a basket roughly woven,
nothing tight, yet still.

But something has burst from the vessel in the night,
something hardly formed, oozing from the frozen mud
breaking away like the nursery of ice on the rivers,
​birthing, melting, flooding.
This is what we know as spring:
the ancient bones of winter just beginning to shed
nothing sweet or nubile,
certainly no green, except, except--
under a root, tiny as the eye of some valuable exotic gem
the slightest gesture, a minute thumbnail of growing, unfurling
insistence.

Probably dandelion, or earliest pasque flower.
Maybe the beginnings of yarrow, or the first breath of bluebell
in the ancient basket,
being gathered by the night giants
coming home for Spring.