spring and all.

{little cherry-coloured buds on the flowering shrub in my yard, yet to burst, two week ago}

{rhubarb leaves unfurling look a bit like gooey subterranean-zombie brains}

{rhubarb unfurling, also about two weeks ago}

{collaged card i made for my cousin for her birthday. that bird is a redpoll finch}

* * *

This is a poem called 'Spring and All' by William Carlos Williams. I know he spent most of his life in New Jersey, but there is something quite northern-prairie-ish about these lines especially:

       ... Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

And the slow progression of the spring coming, so very Albertan:


Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

* * *

The whole collection that 'Spring and All' is part of was apparently written as a response to T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' -- Williams was trying to show the beauty and power in the natural world, in its constant reincarnation... That it truly held something other than the bleakness & inevitable decay. & that is something I have been trying to convey, I realize, in so much of my writing this spring...