Enough of that. Let’s look forward to what’s coming. Spring is around the corner and bringing with it soft rains, blooming flowers, jacket weather, and the smell of growing things. Let this spring also be about hope, personal growth, new beginnings, and all manner of euphemisms that describe what spring means to us besides the earth thawing and Persephone returning from the underworld . And we can start it all off on a bookish note. Here are some spring poems to brighten your day.
Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand by E.E. Cummings
Excerpt: Spring is like a perhaps hand changing everything carefully
Spring Poem for the Sake of Breathing by James Masao Mitsui
Excerpt: The sky wants the water to turn grey, but if I notice how waves play with the clumps of yellow flags, or the way turtles share logs, or even try to understand a friend’s decision to walk onto a glacier and end her life—I will be ready for any poems that have been waiting.
Song of Spring by Hafez
Matsuo Basho
Excerpt: The spring haze. The scent already in the air. The moon and ume.
On Imagination by Phillis Wheatley
Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limón
Excerpt: More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me.
My Mississippi Spring by Margaret Walker
I Have This Way of Being by Jamaal May
Excerpt: I have this, and this isn’t a mouth full of the names of odd flowers I’ve grown in secret. I know none of these by name but have this garden now, and pastel somethings bloom near the others and others.
To John Keats, Poet, at Spring Time by Countee Cullen
Come to Me Here from Crete by Sappho
Excerpt: Come to me here from Crete, To this holy temple, where Your lovely apple grove stands, And your altars that flicker With incense.
A Light Exists in Spring by Emily Dickinson
Two Sewing by Hazel Hall
Excerpt: The Wind is sewing with needles of rain. With shining needles of rain It stitches into the thin Cloth of earth. In, In, in, in. Oh, the wind has often sewed with me. One, two, three.
Spring and All by William Carlos Williams
Cut Lillies by Noah Warren
Gather by Rose McLarney
Excerpt: Some springs, apples bloom too soon. The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs, pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty and quiet. No reason for the bees to come. And if spring and all its optimism is really not your thing, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s got you, and you can check out our summer and winter versions if you want to look back or even further ahead in the seasons. What are your favorite spring poems?
