Not the Cruellest Month

How can there be despair when the entire natural world unfolds with new life? When the anhinga alights from the Nowhere he was into the Somewhere you are, negotiating his spectacular landing, spreading out his Gulliver wingspan to warmth and healing on the grassy knoll that rolls down to the lake-- manmade it may be, but the green-gold ducks don't know that. They swim, they scan, they disappear into its mysterious depths for what nurturance is there. How can there be sorrow when the male cardinal darts across your line of vision with his red reality twice in the same day into the Crape Myrtle as it readies to burst its rooted heart? And, when he comes again at dusk to rest on a budding branch to sing a song you never heard before-- allows you to tell him how beautiful he is. But when you ask him to stay, he darts away because you are not the regulator. How is there is no blessing when the stone gray Buddha in his prayerful place on your porch with his folded hands and bare feet reminds you that the gods we respect do not always look like us. When the Northern mockingbird who fell in love with the South offers his limitless songbook in the Laurel Oak, that wise grandfather, whose leafy language writing the Braille of the senses says Hold On, Hold on, and So, you do.