The corner of my dining room
is crammed with humming incubators.
Gold and lavender chicks trip over one another,
chirping loudly, steadily,
trying to figure a way out of the rounded dome.

There’s a bottle lamb in a tote in the living room.

My basement shelves are stacked
with tomato seedlings.
Their names are Brandywine,
Cherokee Purple,
Sunrise Bumblebee.

Tulips reach leafy arms
from beneath receding snow
on the south side of the house.

My yard is bright
in the warmth of the waxing moon.
Ripples of light are the high harmonies
on the river’s thawing song.

April.
The world is rubbing sleep from her eyes.
She’s filling her lungs with damp air
and smiling at the sound
of her boots pressing air bubbles
up from the muddy hollows.

My eyes are wide again, too —
wider than the gibbous moon.
I have that sense of happening in my body,
A skipping lightness in my chest.

Is it an awakening?
A homecoming?
An answered prayer?

I don’t know its name.
I just know we’re here.
I just know we’re coming out the other side.

The nape of our neck remembers the sun.
Our ears await the first chirps of peeper frogs,
the shouting return of Canada geese.
Our eyes recall the shape
of dandelion and fiddlehead,
robin and sparrow.

If Winter is the test,
Spring must be the star in the top right corner
of the paper beside all of our names,
a note in cursive letters…

You did it.
You made it.
You have what it takes.

– Stacy Harrison

April 4, 2023