So good to see the celandines and violets, hear a woodpecker, watch a bumble bee bump around the outside of the house, smell the wild garlic. So good to see buds on bushes and trees waking up. To walk and not be slogging through mud. To see a good friend and have conversation flow easily as you both walk miles until the sun makes a purple and pink swirling masterpiece as it sets. And never the same sunset twice.
Everything looks better in the sunlight. Even the concrete and brickwork, the roadworks, the tall buildings. But not the litter…
Here’s one of my favourite poems on Spring that I made in to a song with The Mechanicals Band. What a little, simple gem it is, catching the light and giving it right back… “The Trees” by Philip Larkin:
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
