Spring

Cold melts away
Sun rises earlier
Grass grows green
Leaves unfurl
Blossoms lift their heads
Daffodils dress in yellow
Crocuses in purple
Tulips wave red, yellow, pink
Robins pull worms
Songbirds sing
Squirrels scamper
Summer’s coming

Writing about my writing

Why I chose the subject of this poem
Over a hundred robins spent a few days in our backyard. They rested on the fence and in the trees, and hopped about the lawn. On March 1, I stood quietly beneath one of our trees and sketched a robin resting on a branch, and then drafted the poem I call Spring.

How I drafted this poem
I chose to name things that I see in the first days of spring. Then I brainstormed verbs to go with those nouns–what they do in the spring. I paired these together–nouns and verbs–to form the basic lines of the poem. I then chose to bookend my poem with a reference to the seasons that bookend spring–Cold melts away evokes winter at the beginning of the poem; Summer’s coming, the closing line, looks forward.

a poem for
April 2016
National Poetry Month,
a literary celebration inaugurated
by the Academy of American Poetry