I had given up, honestly.
I had settled into the pewter sky, the long colorless fields,
the particular silence of a world that has forgotten warmth.

And then the forsythia, absurd,
all yellow clamor at the edge of the still-frozen road,
as if difficulty were nothing,
as if cold were just a rumor it had heard and disbelieved.

I stop.
I have the wrong shoes.
I stand in the mud like a student with nothing to offer but attention.

Which, I have come to believe,
is the whole assignment.

Somewhere a nuthatch is working the rough bark of the oak,
all business, all purpose,
as if the world were not astonishing.

But it is.
It is.

The peepers,
their high chorus rising from the cold pond
like a kind of proof that God has not finished with tenderness.

That God,
who dreamed up the crocus and the red-winged blackbird
and the first warm rain of March,
is still at it,
still pressing beauty through the cold ground,
still saying here,
still saying look.

I don’t know what prayer is, exactly.
But I know what it feels like to stand outside in April
with my whole heart fully open,

saying yes,

saying I see it,

saying thank you, I almost let another one go by.