Spring break!

We’re taking a week off to enjoy the good weather (we’re in Florida, sorry). We’ll be back before you know it. In the meantime, enjoy a couple of spring-related poems and a quote by Zora Neale Hurston, picked out by our editorial intern, Grace Mackey.

“A Purification” by Wendell Berry

At the start of spring I open a trench
in the ground. I put into it
the winter’s accumulation of paper,
pages I do not want to read
again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the sun, growth of the ground,
finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise;
have been inattentive to wonders;
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse
of mind and body, I close the trench,
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.

“Spring" by Mary Oliver

And here is the serpent again
dragging himself out from his next of darkness,
his cave under the black rocks,
his winter-death.
He slides over the pine needles.
He loops around the bunches of rising grass,
looking for the sun.

Well, who doesn’t want the sun after the long winter?
I step aside,
He feels the air with his soft tongue,
around the bones of his body he moves like oil,

Downhill he goes
toward the black mirrors of the pond.
Last night it was so cold
I woke and went out to stand in the yard,
and there was no moon.

So I just stood there, inside the jaw of nothing.
An owl cried in the distance,
I thought of Jesus, how he
crouched in the dark for two nights,
then floated back above the horizon.

There are so many stories,
more beautiful than answers.
I follow the snake down to the pond,

thick and musky he is
as circular as hope.”

Finally, for all our Floridians, an excerpt from Hitting a Straight Line with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston:

“Spring time in Florida is not a matter of peeping violets or bursting buds merely. It is a riot of color, in nature—glistening green leaves, pink, blue, purple, yellow blossoms that fairly stagger the visitor from the north. The miles of hyacinths are like an undulating carpet on the surface of the river and divide reluctantly when the slow-moving alligators push their way log-like across. The nights are white nights as the moon shines with dazzling splendor, or in the absence of that goddess, the soft darkness creeps down laden with innumerable scents. The heavy fragrance of magnolias mingled with the delicate sweetness of jasmine and wild roses.”

See you next week!