March
Open not yet the windows. The screens can wait. Somewhere, soft light is moving through the fields, the mists, the mud, lying in tender pools. Let it sit there, undisturbed, like the Lenten rose, or the crocus, lighting its fires. And don’t walk onto the ice, where you waited all winter by the still breath of the fishing hole. The trout will not answer you, any more than the cardinal, blinking his hard eye, or the fox kits, blind in their beds. Look to the deer, soft-footed in snow, to the thin lines of their bodies. How they go even now where you cannot follow, passing from one field to the next, like light under a shade. All is in motion: the air, the ice, the first shoots spinning in darkness. Nothing is tame. Trust not the nights.
“March” (1) draws upon John Evelyn’s instructions to “open not yet the windows” and “trust not therefore the Nights too confidently, unless the weather be thorowly settled” in The Gardener’s Almanac (1683).
First published in The Poetry Review (Vol 115, No 4, Winter 2025).
This poem feels like standing at the edge of March and sensing the world shifting in ways you can’t quite touch yet.
There’s a softness in the way it asks us to wait, to let the light and the thaw happen without rushing them.
I love how the early signs of spring are treated like something fragile, almost secret.
The animals the trout, the cardinal, the fox kits all remind us that nature wakes on its own schedule.
The deer moving through the fields like a passing shadow is such a quiet, haunting image.
It captures that moment when everything is in motion, even if it still looks frozen from a distance.
There’s a mix of beauty and unease here, like the season is stretching but not fully awake.
You can feel the restlessness in the air, the sense that something is happening just out of sight.
It’s a gentle reminder that early spring isn’t tame it’s wild, unpredictable, alive.
And beneath it all is a warning: don’t trust the calm; the world is already changing.
Love nature poetry. I should write more of it.