The sound keeps coming out of the flowers

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from 

 

coming.”
 

-Pablo Neruda

Image: Spike Mafford, the black dots spell out the title, The 

Meadow
 

Title: Basso

Spring at Night

the news arrived that this time we would only see the spring at night and that a spider crawls across the paper where I’m writing that the gift is here

-Pablo Picasso, The Burial Of The Count Of Orgaz & Other Poems

Photo: Adam Putnam, Untitled (wisp) (2007)

Would you die for spring?

You knock

without knowing that you knocked. The door

opens on a century of clouds and centuries

of centuries of clouds. The bird sings

among the toyons in the spring’s diligence

of rain. And then what? Hand on your heart.

Would you die for spring? What would you die for?

Anything?

-Robert Hass from "Berkeley Eclogue" 

Image: Alasdair Wallace, A flock of birds, 1999