The Day Everything Changed

We wake on this mild March morning

expecting the maple branches at last

to break out their long-awaited virgin leaves,

to cast a blackcurrant canopy

over timid crocuses and daffodils

periscoping up through the unkept rough

to see if winter mischief has had enough and given up.

We look during a lazy late afternoon break,

eager to catch glimpse of the luminescent thief of Spring,

the sheen of glowing green overrunning the tired hills,

stealing in plain sight the brown wet blanket

of dead weed and matted leaf.

How surprised we would be if this were the day

that everything changed. An invisible menace tricking

the clocks into ticking backwards. Skittish leaves

ducking back inside their thick-skinned branch-beds,

lemon-yellow skunk cabbage burying their bright heads

down deep into dark mud again, and weightless blades of baby grass

lifting up and melting into the wisps of escaping morning dew.

We would wake to view a very different world,

adrift in a script with different rules,

streets and fields strangely familiar

like old photographs from before the war,

sepia-faded, wrinkled and torn,

held so gingerly in our sanitized hands.

I would ignore the public health order,

and kiss the dirty edge of the picture,

already longing for what once was,

vowing to never take for granted again

the smell of hyacinth, the inexpressible good

of a sudden playful mid-March breeze

ruffling the heads of the trees in the wood.