It’s easy to write gayly for the spring
Despite a couple of unseasonably chilly days, spring has sprung here in Michigan: mostly blue skies, flowers showing their colors, trees budding, birds singing, the whole nine yards. After another long, grey midwest winter, it’s hard not to feel celebratory as the gloom lifts. In addition to taking some more walks and smiling at strangers and generally being less depressed, the mood has infected my poetry: as I try to write a new poem every day, I keep finding myself drafting kind of cheery ones or light ones (like last week’s “Beautiful poem”), departures from my usual tone entirely on accident, like it’s some sort of reflex to the sunshine. Suddenly surrounded by the warmth of April, it can feel like there’s nothing else to write about but the weather.
Today’s piece started that way, doodling sentences about the season. But after a few (very nice! very light!) sentences, it turned on me, and I found myself worrying over what right I had to write like this at times like these. Which is a silly thought, of course, I know, but I couldn’t get it out of my head and the mood was broken. I kept thinking about a tweet that read “I feel like they're trying to gaslight everyone to the point of madness with all this violence; it's embarrassing to try to use words against it; it's embarrassing not to,” and felt embarrassed to be using words to write about flowers. Efficacy be damned: if I was going to be using words for anything, I might as well try using them against genocide. So I changed course and started down a familiar path, trying to absolve myself of the absurdity of writing a happy poem while the bombs keep falling by juxtaposing my happiness with the horrors.
So the poem turned as I thought of missiles and famine and thirst. But what was I doing, coloring Palestine grey in contrast to my blue skies, rhetorically robbing the Palestinians of spring? So I did some googling and found out that before this decades-long siege, Gaza was an exporter of flowers, and that even now Gazan fields erupt with wildflower colors to celebrate the season. This was an important reminder: when spring comes, flowers will bloom, even through unimaginable violence.
Using words to expose or even just express the terror and the ruin is essential, but it’s also important to remember that Palestinian lives do not cease to be visited by beauty, that a single brush cannot capture this moment. So this is a poem about all that: here’s to letting spring in, no matter the matter at hand.
It’s easy to write gayly for the spring it’s easy to write gayly for the spring, all tangled birdsong and eager flowers and later nights before the sun goes home, all budding trees testing the air for their leaves and forgotten frosts, the thaw crumbling away at your feet and the throat of your shovel; the birds wake before the sky and are there to welcome you into every new day, the ice-like light of early morning. blossoms, blossoming, blossomed: crocus and hyacinth and daffodil, your heart tulips open, exposed only to what’s above. it’s easy to write gayly for the spring, but what time is left for flowers when the bloom we know best is violence an ocean away, blooming the unseemly grey of red and ruin? to bloom: become radiant or glowing. there, the season is coming like dryrot to wood, a tumbledown shell of itself, an arid warmth that threatens the tenuous alliance of rainfall and survival. the sky gone blind- white: bright sun broken up by drones and vague promises in airdropped boxes labeled not enough, not nearly enough. but flowers, you must not forget there are flowers there, too, even though you cannot see them, or are not shown: red anemones and redder poppies, buttercups and daisies and sunny marigolds. yes, it’s easy to write gayly for the spring.