Category Archives: Spring

Spring watch

A poem by Frances Watkins Harper:

Dandelions.

Welcome children of the Spring,
   In your garbs of green and gold,
Lifting up your sun-crowned heads
   On the verdant plain and wold.

As a bright and joyous troop
   From the breast of earth ye came
Fair and lovely are your cheeks,
   With sun-kisses all aflame.

In the dusty streets and lanes,
   Where the lowly children play,
There as gentle friends ye smile,
   Making brighter life’s highway

Dewdrops and the morning sun,
   Weave your garments fair and bright,
And we welcome you to-day
   As the children of the light.

Children of the earth and sun.
   We are slow to understand
All the richness of the gifts
   Flowing from our Father’s hand.

Published in Poems by Frances Watkins Harper, 1895. Complete book at Project Gutenberg.

While searching for poetry by Unitarians and Universalists, I came across “Dandelions.” Even though Frances Harper uses late 19th C. American poetic conventions which may sound dated to our ears, her images and her thinking captured my attention. I liked the image of “Where the lowly children play/ There as gentle friends ye smile”; which is both profoundly egalitarian, while also in the context of the poem perhaps offering an exegesis of Mark 10.13-16 where Jesus befriends children.

And I particularly liked the image of humanity she offers in the fifth and sixth stanzas, when she calls us human beings “the children of the light. / Children of the earth and sun.” Those two lines alone make the poem for me.

This being the week when dandelions are beginning to appear widely in New Bedford, I thought I’d post the poem here as a sort of meditation on the season.

Spring watch

Standing on Pope’s Island this afternoon, I saw both a few last winter residents and one of the first summer residents. A pair of Buffleheads, perhaps the last of the ducks who wintered on the harbor, swam and dove in the water around the city marina, not far from the first of the recreational boats that appeared in the slips this week. Further out in the middle of the harbor, a Cormorant, one of the first summer residents to arrive in the harbor, flapped heavily and rose from the water where it had been holding its wings up to dry.

Late last week, the harbor was still full of wintering waterfowl. On Thursday, when the temperatures went up into the seventies, I walked over to the boat landing in Fairhaven. There I stood and counted more than thirty Brant, two dozen Buffleheads, and perhaps a dozen Red-Breasted Mergansers; and all the while, a Mockingbird sang lustily from a nearby tree. The waterfowl must have taken that warm day as a warning call for spring migration, because since then I haven’t seen more than a dozen waterfowl on any one day; and today I only saw those two Bufflehead.

Spring watch

Red buds on gray twigs —
maples come into bloom and
pollen fills the air.

Pollen fills the air,
it makes me stupid, I don’t
feel that cold north wind.

Feel that cold north wind!
Daylight is lengthening but
earth is not yet warm.

Earth is not yet warm
enough to turn green. But trees —
red buds on gray twigs.

Spring watch

At 6:30, I finally made the last phone call of the day and headed out for a walk. I figured I had half an hour before it got dark. I walked briskly, not paying too much attention to anything except walking.

Looking down from the pedestrian bridge over Route 18, the man running past the Wharfinger Building on Fisherman’s Wharf looked like John. He wasn’t wearing John’s usual bright yellow Cheerios hat, though, so it couldn’t be John. Only a handful of people run regularly down along the waterfront, and briefly I wondered if another runner had moved into our neighborhood.

As i walked down the spiral ramp that leads from the pedestrian bridge to the wharf, I met John running up. “John!” I said. “You’re not wearing your Cheerios hat!”

“I know,” he said. “I thought it was much warmer than it really is.”

Yesterday was warm and sunny, but today the clouds moved in and it got chilly. I was wearing my big winter coat; John was wearing a long-sleeved jersey and shorts. He looked cold. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s cold today.”

He didn’t linger, but headed on home.

Spring watch

It didn’t feel that cold when I went out to take a walk this evening, but the wind was chilly. It was a raw damp spring wind that reminds you that we could still get snow. I had had a busy day at work, with more than the usual ups and downs. It was six o’clock when I finally left the office. I was going to take just a short walk before making dinner. But I kept thinking about the work day, the thoughts tumbling all around inside me. Carol was going to be at a meeting this evening. Dinner could wait. I kept walking.

When I finally got home at 7:30, all those tumbling thoughts had come to rest. And I had walked hard enough and long enough and fast enough that it felt warm and almost springlike outside.

Spring watch

A few notes of bird song drifted across Route 18 during a momentary lull in the traffic. “A Song Sparrow,” I said to Carol, “now where would a Song Sparrow be?…”; there aren’t many places in a marine industrial zone where a Song Sparrow would want to sit and sing. We came up to the top of the pedestrian bridge over the highway, in the March sunshine. “It’s so warm,” said Carol. “It feels like spring.” It felt like spring all the way over to Pope’s Island, where we bought a newspaper and a couple of magazines. But on the way back, the clouds started to cover the sky, and it felt damp and chilly down by the water of the harbor, and it stopped feeling like spring. Even though the sun peeked out now and then, it felt gray and dim, it felt as though real spring wouldn’t come for months.

Spring watch

Carol and I were sitting at the table eating breakfast, Carol was telling me about something she was doing down at her office on Fish Island, when something outside the window behind her, moving in the breeze, caught my eye. Look, I said, rudely interrupting her, and pointing out the window. What, she said. The maple tree, it’s got buds, I said; our apartment is on the second floor so we look right into the branches of the Red Maple in the sidewalk across the street. The morning sun lit up the swelling purplish-red buds so that they stood out against the wall of the Whaling Museum, which was still in shadow. Carol turned, and looked. She wasn’t as interested as I was, and she turned back. Red buds on the maple tree, spring is coming, I said. She continued her story. Red buds on the maple tree, I thought happily to myself, listening to her story.

Spring watch

At 6:30 this morning, I was suddenly wide awake. This is unusual, because I always get up at seven on work days. But now the days are longer, and the sun rises early enough to make me think that it’s past the time when I should be awake and out of bed, which made me awaken with a start this morning thinking, Have I slept through the alarm? I looked at the clock and reassured myself that I had another half hour to sleep.

The temperature got up to 50 degrees today, warm enough to feel like spring. But it was dark and gloomy for most of the day, and even though we got rain instead of snow the sky had all the gloom of winter. February is always a difficult month in New England: the days start to get longer, we get occasional spells of warm weather, but you can’t get decent vegetables, it’s bound to snow again, and we’re still sunk in winter gloom. People talk about “spiritual practices,” but as a born and bred New Englander I mistrust “spiritual practices,” because I know the only thing that’s going to stand up to February is good old fashioned religious discipline: so I write every day whether I want to or not (and believe me, today I don’t want to), and I religiously take a long walk every day. With a little bit of discipline, I can ignore the winter gloominess and focus on the tiniest signs of spring, like the fact that I came awake a half an hour early this morning.