Spring!

Three poems for the season and your spirits, featuring Penelope Scambly Schott, Rachel Heimowitz and Hunt Hawkins.
7 minutes

TRANSCRIPT

Spring begins Thursday, March 20, at 5:02 in the morning Eastern time. That moment is more formally known as the spring or vernal equinox; day and night are about as close to the same length as they get. From then ‘til the summer solstice—sometime around June 21st—the days will continue to get longer. Then it’s all downhill ‘til next winter when the cycle begins again.

And although we’re not going to dance around Stonehenge—do they do that on the equinox or only on the solstice?—we are going to celebrate with some spring-related pieces from Passager.

Penelope Scambly Schott said, “Everything makes me think of something else so that my mind runs quickly along surprising trails of ideas. I am always seeing how all life is mysteriously connected. My recent poems are full of animals because I see our kinship and know that is what I am.” Here’s Penelope’s poem “The Year I Discovered Spring by the Lake in Central Park.”

During recess, I hid in a circle of bushes,
each branch popping with fat green dots,
and felt my bones grow, and a light fuzz
rise on my arms.

If I try to explain that moment, how leaves
that opened in my grandparents’ garden
would open here in the city too, how Spring
unrolled like a map,

I have to remember my friend Helen Bohmer
and how I whispered to her from the bushes,
How much would someone have to pay you
to swim in a lake of pee?

The city ducks all quacked in murky water,
and from some avenue beyond the park
an ambulance replied ee-aw-eee. Spring:
I almost dove in.

“The Year I Discovered Spring by the Lake in Central Park” by Passager’s 2011 Passager Poet Penelope Scambly Schott.

Next, “Ionized Air” by Rachel Heimowitz from the 2015 Passager Poetry Contest issue. Rachel said, “I was inspired to write ‘Ionized Air’ by the very particular smell the Judean Desert takes on when it rains. Then there was gardening and reading the work of Robert Bly, and the poem was born.”

The poem begins with this epigraph by Robert Bly: “This solitude covered with iron.”

Kneeling in my garden, hands
lost in sandy soil, urging
each blossom to launch into the long

spring that is a desert
winter, I smell
every ancient man who has passed

here before me. Days
rise out of empty hills, unleashing
into clear light and white

birds who glide into this new winter-green,
their feet arrows
trailing behind, pointed

and black. Or nights,
when a full moon is stretched across the sand,
the thunder I hear isn’t a coming

storm ready to feed the flowers,
the hills, or me. Each clap is cannon
fire bursting into the transparent

night, each bloom attended by a machine
gun that enters my body
in a wingbeat of panic,

a battle echoed into ionized air
in a land where the hills are etched
in centuries, in battles,

in the trail that follows an ancient
aqueduct deep into the wadi, in
these lines on my hands

sunk into this soil
that smells of urine
and copper, the smell of old

American pennies, each ingrained
with the face of a proud Indian,
long dead and forgotten.

Rachel Heimowitz’s poem “Ionized Air.”

Hunt Hawkins said his poem “Our Porch at Night” was inspired by the building of a nest by a cardinal couple in his porch lamp in Tampa. He said, “The cardinals parallel our own family, including sadly the unhatched egg.” He said the poem’s written as a single sentence “to suggest the ongoing flow of life.”

Up at night, I see soft creamy light
filling our porch, flowing through
twisted Solomonic columns, illuminating the swing
and the bucket of golf balls hit into the yard
by paunchy men too ashamed to retrieve them,
which I’ve collected as subtle tribute,
and the nest in the hanging lamp
the cardinals built three weeks ago,
scraggly outside but inside a perfect cup
where the dun-colored female sat
until her two chicks hatched, almost worms at first,
but growing daily, open mouths straight up,
puffy gray fledging, hopping to the edge
with scrawny wings, the mother modeling short flights,
then their brave leap, angling to the ground
while the brilliant father flew to a nearby tree,
crying distraction, until they got safely to a bush,
then the next day all gone, leaving only
a single speckled blue egg that failed to hatch,
that’s all right my wife said,
so much promise in spring, that’s all right,
as I walk out on the porch and watch above dark trees
the lustrous full moon.

“Our Porch at Night,” Hunt Hawkins from Passager’s 2023 Poetry Contest issue.

To subscribe to or learn more about Passager and its commitment to writers over 50, go to passagerbooks.com.  

Passager’s offering a five-session poetry writing workshop beginning March 23 for writers in the Baltimore area. If you’d like more information, go to the Events page on our website passagerbooks.com. We hope that in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be offering online workshops, as well. We’ll let you know as those develop.

You can download Burning Bright from Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts, and various other podcast apps. Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.

For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.