Forsythia
Driving with the sunroof open
and feeling spring pour in
onto my neck and shoulders,
I notice all the forsythia
in the neighborhood
have woken up.
Like a kindergartener’s overeager
drawing, all wild and woolly
with too much yellow—
these scraggly tentacles of sunshine
won’t be tamed.
You can come at them
with your pruning shears
but you will be rebuffed.
The forsythia bows to no man’s notion
of how a neat yard should look.
You will back away,
hands raised in surrender.
It will have its say
and it will be loud about it.
Yellow, yellow, and then some!
Spring is not a shy season–
forsythia denounces
winter days as if they will
never come again.
*
Angie Blake-Moore has been a teacher of 3- and 4-year-olds in Washington, DC for 30 years. She’s had work published in Potomac Review, Green Mountains Review, ONE ART, and like a field among others, including the anthology Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin 1984-2001. She recently had a poem chosen for Moving Words in Arlington, VA where her poem was displayed in county buses.
Lovely. Perfect for those neighborhood drives in the spring. For me one can never get too much yellow. Thanks.