NPM: Spring

Claude Monet, Willows in Springtime

This is new. My friends and family in higher latitudes are greeting the crocuses, cherry blossoms, and robins, while I'm down in the tropics, sweating my balls off in a summer without end and periodically dreaming of melting icicles and skunk cabbage. Today I'm posting a poem called "Spring" by the illustrious Edna St. Vincent Millay (whom we've visited once or twice before) as means of self-consolation.

If the daffodils ask about me, tell them they got lucky this year.

Spring

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.