On Sunday I rowed as a substitute with my old crew in the quad. I have no words to describe the feeling of rightness in fatigued muscles and blistered fingers. Better, I was on the canal in March. The daffodils may be out among the roadway, but those are planted and stand in full sunlight. Spring is barely beginning to kiss the woods, and I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it.
Persephone proceeds, neither heralded by horns
Nor striding a red carpet like a latter-day diva.
Scarcely noticeable, she drifts amid a green mist
Glimpsed through grey and winter-knotted boles
Bedecked in cherry blossom, adorned with forsythia
On her sweet inexorable return to the upper world.
There’s something about rowing on a canal in spring that would force poetry out of a stone; this isn’t even my first attempt.
(Possibly I ought to change my name to Alliteration K. Assonance.)