Primo Vere - Spring Comes

Spring comes Quietly-- Not with the bleating of lambs or The tweeting of birds or the Beating of butterfly wings Spring comes Silently-- Celtic through the Neolithic stones, Unheralded by peering shadow-seekers Rummaging around on the Second of February, and unannounced by a Banner on the front page of the National Enquirer… Unpresaged by pregnant April Showers, Spring comes-- Alive Nota bene: This is one of the few pieces of juvenilia I have preserved. It was written when I was at college (the University of Florida), in 1979, when I was in the English Department High Honors Seminar. We had an assignment to write a poem about Spring, but to try not to fall into the usual cliches. I thought it might be fun to mention some of those cliches ironically. We had one-on-one tutorials with a number of well-known novelists and poets; one of mine was with the poet Richard Eberhart. He told me he liked this poem and that it was a good one, so I have kept it these four decades.