Today's poem is by John Hoppenthaler

My Second Spring
       

It's said, if a man witnesses,
in a single year, a second
spring, he pays with a season from
his life. Thousands of miles away,

thanks to this new climate's largesse,
summer has already begun.
Fledglings peer from the lips of nests.
Behold the huge, peculiar world

into which each bird will tumble.
Gray squirrels gambol and flirt below.
Our spent azalea blossoms rot
into soil. Let it be winter

I relinquish, if it must be
early death. My father's plummet
into a snowbank he'd shoveled,
how his heart gave out in the cold.

His only instruction was not
to be set into frozen earth.
I saw his smoke, therefore, sifting
through March, strokes from that gray palette.
Amen, then, it's winter I'll forfeit.

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Copyright © 2023 John Hoppenthaler All rights reserved
from Kestrel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission