On the Yahara

"(Ah little rocks the laborer,
How near his work is holding him to God.
The loving Laborer through space and time).
–Whitman, from "Song of the Exposition"






Yahara Spring V


A stiff gust sweeps off the last of the icy mists
that hibernate Lake Monona,
sweep off the thick matted oak leaves that
have held the crystallized muds and tended
to the autumn seeds, stuck, sleeping, an inner
throbbing though that could never fully sleep.
The gardner and farmer of the coming months
feels the same blank throb at the fingertips
and knows that the season of humility comes,
the months of warmth and rain come seeking
all those who would labor for the world.
In labor the man and woman find identities
leaving and lifting above the land and water,
themselves becoming but that which is digging,
becoming the sharpened hoe creating
the canals for the seeds along the raised beds,
becoming the moist soil roiling with waking worms,
the watering can singing and returning
birds singing and stashing the dandelion stems
for nests bound to the leafing limbs.
When man and woman fill themselves by seeds,
and night approaches it is no longer
the cold apparitions that visit but the rising
of flower petals and lilac vines that reach
ever upward always growing.

"Long and long has the green been growing,
Long and long has the rain been falling,
Long has the globe been rolling around."