Fools of Spring

May Day, and the bells ring out in distant Oxford, and the grass grows green on the sunny side of the house, and the blackbirds make a racket in the bracken, and we are shouting the same glad song for winter’s death with each stomp of our rubber boots.

Spring turns us all into yabbering fools, sprouting sincere, if unoriginal, poetry. And why not? Spring awakens our childlikeness. No one has ever said of a child’s first stab at a cat or the sun or their father, “Not bad, but I think it’s been done before.”

We are children, delighting in life and trying to get at its very essence, and all we have are shadow words next to its glory. Yet that should not, must not, stop us, for part of the glory we share is this urge of reproduction, the desire to create, and in creating to somehow comprehend our own origins in the freshness deep down.

Spring is not notable for its originality, but for its origin. God makes the spring come to Oxford and our island alike, this I tell my son. Woven into the patterns of the earth, spun up in its turning, spring is the recurring invitation to become the child we were born to be. 

~lg