Spring

[Jack Field]

  

What a joyous feeling. 

 

I see pools of water and street vendors somewhat scantily clad.
A taxi passes, its passenger window half cocked.
A smoke store greets me with an open door and ice chunks falling from the 3rd and 4th floor wake me from slumber.  
Pools of water and melting ice; has winter passed?

 

Tonight I walked, as I have so often done before, from Happy Home to Nautilus. Two minutes in the snow and dodging the ice on the road. For the first time I felt a swift breeze, cool, yet not biting. Those trousers could not fight off a stiff wind but my face was not bitten or attacked by a frozen gale. I, for those briefest of moments was happy, more than happy, to walk the streets of Chang Chun. A true sense of elation, a true sense of satisfaction passed over me; it was a sense of warmth, the breath of a true Spring greeted me. Winter, so cold and dark here in the North-East, so biting and unforgiving, gave sway. Winter held back, it yielded, it relented. Winter, that for so long has tried to crush us, called upon its allies, the ice, the snow, the sleet, and proved itself the weaker. Winter, I said, “do your worst,” as we shall do ours. There was no retort.

A spider, so small and insignificant took its place in the upper corner of a barbeques toilet. Solemn and unmoving it has already weaved a home of its own. A week has passed and it has utilised this new warm day to herald unto this once frozen corner, its own little corner of the world. What does arachnophobia really mean when one sees the return of “life” to a city that seemed ever only to produce dead and painted trees? Ah! The joyous feeling, seeing life, that feeling of witnessing, as if for the first time, a Spring emerge from the misery and cutting decay of one very harsh winter! This is a good thing. It is a wholesome and enriching feeling, unlike any other, because you have endured what the spider has endured. You struggled through the worst, and now you make your homes all the more comfortable. You anticipate a new and exciting season, and we together open our windows and fear no more the bullying harshness of winter’s winds, its cold, and its unforgiving temper. We laugh at it now, its slow decay, and as it retreats we hope it may never ever return again!  

J 

[Clement]

Je Prefere Sans Doute   By Arthur Rimbaud

Je préfère sans doute, au printemps, la guinguette
Où des marronniers nains bourgeonne la baguette,
Vers la prairie étroite et communale, au mois
De mai. Des jeunes chiens rabroués bien des fois
Viennent près des Buveurs triturer des jacinthes
De plate-bande. Et c’est, jusqu’aux soirs d’hyacinthe,
Sur la table d’ardoise où, l’an dix-sept cent vingt
Un diacre grava son sobriquet latin
Maigre comme une prose à des vitraux d’église
La toux des flacons noirs qui jamais ne les grise.

François Coppée.
Arthur Rimbaud

[Richard Roman]

Jack - you wrote too damn soon - it is bitter outside!

[Valentina]

...Mowgli had always delighted in the turn of the seasons. It was he who generally saw the first Eye-of-the-Spring deep down among the grasses, and the first bank of spring clouds, which are like nothing else in the Jungle. His voice could be heard in all sorts of wet, star-lighted, blossoming places, helping the big frogs through their choruses, or mocking the little upside-down owls that hoot through the white nights. Like all his people, spring was the season he chose for his flittings--moving, for the mere joy of rushing through the warm air, thirty, forty, or fifty miles between twilight and the morning star, and coming back panting and laughing and wreathed with strange flowers...

[Richard Roman]

Mahatma jack and his litereature. fantastic

T S Eliot had another take on it:

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering	5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,	10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,	15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.