The Poetry of Spring

When I was eight years old, I wrote two poems.

The first one was a tribute to the American flag. It started off in a promising fashion but it ended with a stanza in which I rhymed all with all. Rather than go to all the trouble of rewriting that poem, I tried again with a new topic.

This time, I wrote about spring.

I am hardly the first person to have sung the praises of spring in poetic form; in fact, poems about spring abound throughout history. William Wordsworth wrote one, as did Emily Dickinson, and so has nearly every other poet who ever put pen to paper. But at age eight, I didn't content myself with writing about spring in general—I wrote about The Sound of Spring. My poem opened with references to the sound of "tree leaves sprouting" (huh?) and "voices shouting," then circled back to the poem's repeated refrain: the sound of spring is here.

I still enjoy pondering the sounds of spring, although I can't say that I've heard many tree leaves sprouting lately (must be a skill that is peculiar to eight-year-olds). But there are plenty of memorable sounds that do fill my ears all through the month of April:

Robins chirping . . . spring peepers peeping . . . Canadian geese honking . . . sandhill cranes calling . . . water rushing from a hose . . . ducks quacking on the pond . . . rain echoing on the barn roof . . . a newborn foal nickering . . . lambs bleating . . . honey bees buzzing . . . the staccato tapping of a woodpecker . . . the steady drip of sap into a bucket . . . even the sticky sound of muck boots tromping through mud (or even better—getting sucked off of my foot entirely).

Spring sounds are as wondrous as the season itself, and the very thought of them fills me with inspiration—so much inspiration, in fact, that I almost feel compelled to write another poem about spring right now.

And I might even rhyme all with all, y'all.