For you, today.
At the end of February finding myself in a field,
I saw them there, across the way at the edge of the forest,
those wild turkeys shining in the noonday sun,
black and bulbous like cannonballs.
At first I thought they were a mirage -
the wind was so strong that day it hurt my eyes to look -
but they looked pleased and proud.
And then I noticed the robins, not far away,
hopping across the turf as robins do,
stopping at times, standing at attention and surveying the field before them,
only to continue their previous practice
and their matter-of-fact searching for worms.
The leaves and the trees and the wind thrust themselves at my senses,
rousing themselves cacophonously behind me,
like the child who is no longer the youngest in the family,
wanting so badly to be be noticed in the old family videos,
coming from off the screen and forcing her face in the camera lens,
when her parents are trying to film her baby sister -
received with a sigh and a modicum of irritation,
but with a laugh and surely not unwelcome.
I scuffed my feet and looked down at the sandals I hadn’t worn since
September, at the cracked and worn leather,
and at the young and earnest blades of grass,
swaying and crashing in the wind like waves on a beach,
and at my white, white feet.
And i smiled, realizing that i hadn’t been the only one that had come
to the field that day,
looking for spring.
[c]
