Poetry / Reading / Writing

National Poetry Month: An Ode to April

Catherine Flynn11 Comments

I know it’s Saturday afternoon, but here’s my Poetry Friday post. This month I had every intention of writing a poem a day in response to the ideas, connections and echoes between All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson and Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. That hasn’t happened, but I still have a week!

In Rooted, Haupt includes creativity as one of the tenets of rootedness. She writes that “the joining of our own unique arts to those of the collective whole is the deepest — perhaps the only — hope for the continuation of a wild earth.” (p. 28) So on this day after Earth Day, here is my contribution to the collective whole.

Ode to an April Morning

This April morning
the world vibrates with life.

Day-old goslings, 
swaddled 
in gray and yellow down
scramble onto the edge
of the pond,
follow mama and papa
to a patch of fresh grass,
nibble their first meal.

Painted turtles 
bask
in the warmth
of the sun,
heads raised in
celebration.

A pair of cardinals
dart in and out
of a holly bush,
scouting out
the perfect spot
to build their
nest.

And in the field, 
violets shimmer
with possibility.

Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2022

Please be sure to visit Margaret at Reflections on the Teche for the Poetry Friday Roundup and to catch up with this year’s Progressive Poem.

11 thoughts on “National Poetry Month: An Ode to April”

  3. I’m glad you wrote, Catherine, & brought this lovely spring scene to us. Ah, those goslings are adorable. We don’t have cardinals here in Colorado & I miss seeing them as I did growing up in Missouri. Your final line feels how all of us feel in spring, that special “possibility” of newness. Have a lovely Sunday!

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