Tag Archives: snowdrops

Something like hope

Wintry weeks grind along like the noisy snowplows tearing through sheets of ice this morning. At least we are having a winter, unlike some years. I may not love winter–especially the short, grey days–yet I live in a region that needs it. Indeed, it is February (alas); but in a few weeks I’m liable to notice snowdrops emerging from the dirt. Anticipation stirs my heart. It feels something like hope, although hope is something I feel less inclined to believe in every year. I guess my problem with hope is that it feels like there is human agency invested in the concept, and as I age I recognize how little effect our wishes, hopes, and prayers have upon anything.

Photo from Feb. 9th of last year; as of now, no blossoms yet!

The snowdrops emerge all the same, until such time as they can no longer withstand changes in their environment. There is some comfort in that, for me.

~

Dave Bonta recently reposted (on his Substack and Bluesky accounts) a post by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez called “Why Keep Blogging in 2025?” It’s a lengthy piece (for a post) but brings up some worthy points. He closes with this paragraph, one that I find I heartily agree with–it is why I do what I do:

“Before they became walled gardens, social networks were great places for discovery, and although posts with links don’t get the visibility they used to on the bigger platforms, you shouldn’t be blogging or socializing for scale anyway. Defy Big Social and share those links to your own posts, and to posts you’ve enjoyed. Blogs only die when they’re abandoned by their owners.”

~

Not all of us need to be blogging for scale. That’s a capitalist, celebrity- and status-focused thing that sucks the love and beauty out of poetry, prose, and the arts. We shouldn’t be creating for Big Bucks or Pulitzers but because writing/art is what we love and what we do.

~

Speaking of art…here are three ekphrastic poems of mine, just published in Unleash Lit, which is an online journal that uses a Substack platform.

https://www.unleashlit.com/p/ekphrastic-poems-by-ann-e-michael

lìchūn

As is not uncommon in our region, we have a warm and sunny spate of days that evoke thoughts of spring…often thoughts that are dashed by late-arriving snow and ice storms. The days are an hour longer than they were at the December solstice, and some plants bloom or start to bloom: witch hazel, snowdrops, hellebores, skunk cabbage, winter aconite.

In the Chinese lunar-solar calendar, these weeks mark the start of spring: 立春 lìchūn. (Hence the new year commences, celebrated this year on February 10.)

I love the emergence of new growth in springtime and enjoy looking for buds and leaf-tips, but winter’s crucial to this environment. It plays its role by enforcing dormancy and restful, unperceived rejuvenation. Nonetheless, sometimes I resent the way it teases–knowing that the freezing will return and that mid-March snows are not uncommon here. That has made me think to post my poem “Spring Lies,” which appears in The Red Queen Hypothesis.
~~

Spring Lies

Sun through fog. The leaves of beech trees gleam
low under the tall expressive line of ash and poplar
whose topmost reaches, feathered by the mist,
wait budded but un-leafed. The starlings stop, are
tethered to their twigs for brief collective
breaths and urgent calls that rally all
to action once again—a whir, black-speckled sky,
the poplars barren after the birds’ brawl
moves off. An hour goes by. The meadow’s damp
expanse reveals patches and threads of green.
Here, mud seems harmless: winter has decamped.

Meanwhile, a small town near a river bank
sighs beneath a dank slide, silenced, loses
all but longitude and latitude.

People want to feel the home they choose is
safe but, at best, they stake a compromise—
fire, flood, crime rate, mud. Spring’s temperate. Spring lies.

~

Apology

Speaking of February, here’s a poem trying to make amends for my dislike of the briefest month. This apology appeared in Prairie Wolf Press Review*, and I may include it in my next collection (whenever that may be).

~

Apology

For years I have held February
answerable to many sorrows
as though the month itself
were responsible for its appearance:
the dour days too short, long nights
steeped in frosty bitterness.
Resigned to hibernation,
February made me sleepy.
Dulled my skin, sucked dream
into a cold vacuum
like a vacant acre of outer space,
a stone of ice upon my chest.

But today, I watch a small herd
of yearling deer file gingerly along
the hedgerow over crusted snow
and sense thaw within.
The days, brief, are nonetheless
beginning their shadowy
stretch into spring. It is the month
owls urge themselves
toward mating, their querying calls
strung along night’s bare branches;
the month buzzards return
from foraging the more southerly dead.

Skunks break dormancy amid
tussocks of snowdrops;
sometimes, the hellebore blooms.
I have been observing February
from all the wrong angles.
No, this is not the wild greening of April
nor the fragrant abundance of June,
but it is something that deserves better
than repudiation or scorn.
To February, which has given me much
besides unhappiness, I offer my apology.

~

~~~

*Prairie Wolf Press seems to have folded, alas.

 

29 days

 

I am trying really hard to learn to like February.

I already yearn for these blooms, which often open this month:

flowers plant spring macro

snowdrops photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

52005884_10218951450921552_3046548602315866112_o

 

Indeed, the snowdrops are emerging slightly; I see hints of white amid the tufts of deep-green leaves. The winterhazel buds haven’t really swelled just yet, though. Some years, we have hellebore and dwarf irises in February–it isn’t entirely drab, grey, chilly, and wet for 29 days. Reminding myself of that helps a little. Why, we had one warm and sunny day earlier in the week! The flies and stinkbugs buzzed about drowsily, and the birds made a little more noise than usual.

But part of me says–oh, wait a bit. There could be plenty of snow in March.

53639405_10219093314068042_488479219123224576_o

March, 2018

How to allay the anticipation-stress that sits heavily on me, body and soul, this month?

J. P. Seaton’s translation of Han Shan (I own a copy of this book):

There is a man who makes a meal of rosy clouds:
where he dwells the crowds don’t ramble.
Any season is just fine with him,
the summer just like the fall.
In a dark ravine a tiny rill drips, keeping time,
and up in the pines the wind’s always sighing.
Sit there in meditation, half a day,
a hundred autumns’ grief will drop away.

~

I am not much for sitting in meditation, but Han Shan suggests it might do me some good–so that the griefs fall away, so that any season is “just fine” with me.

Worth a try…

       –anyway, it’s a short month.

Memorial

snowdrop

At last, the snowdrops: spring has deigned to return.

Renewal, rebirth–and remembrance.

~

In a post from 2011, I wrote about poet Chris Natale Peditto, a long-time friend who had recovered from a serious cerebral arteriovenous malformation that resulted in a temporary loss of his abilities to read, write, and speak.

Chris died in November of 2013, just before his 70th birthday. This afternoon, I will be attending a celebratory event in his memory in the city he loved and left, Philadelphia. We will be reading his poetry, letters, and prose, speaking poems aloud as he loved to do. There will be many artists of many kinds attending this gathering, and we will be honoring his place among us.

Outside this morning, a pelting rain, expected to clear a bit later today. A weather report that suits the mood.

Exhaustion & bloom

Isak Dinesen: “I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”

~

Some days, the little is…quite little. I am not exactly taking a break from reading and writing, but a great deal of my reading these days is student-written work; and the writing tends to be corrective.

There are also events in one’s life that tend to push back against the time needed to dwell on creative things.

Kurt Vonnegut: “So it goes.”

~

I’m re-reading Descartes. The best part of his philosophical writing, in my opinion, deals with his conscious desire to remove all prejudicial thinking from his mind. I have my doubts as to his success in that regard, but I love the splendidness of trying to attain the mental tabula rasa. Open-mindedness, a virtue more human beings should strive to embrace.

~

And there is also exhaustion, pure and simple. Some days, I need my rest.

February: awaiting the snowdrops’ blooms. (They’re nearing…the white tips are visible, enclosed in the deep green spathes.) Meanwhile, fragrant yellow winterhazel.

corylopsis

winter hazel