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Song of the February Light

I celebrate the pale light of February, the stubborn sun that climbs
above the frozen fields and says: I am here, I have not abandoned you.
O the gray mornings! O the crystalline afternoons!
I have walked through them barefoot in my soul,
counting each blade of grass that dares to dream beneath the frost.

I sing the continent of winter, the vast republic of silence,
the democracy of bare oaks standing equal in the wind,
each one stripped to its essential self, each one a monument
to endurance, to the long patience of roots.

Do you think the earth forgets?
I tell you the earth remembers everything—
every seed that was buried, every name that was whispered
into the November ground, every promise the autumn made
before it turned its back and walked into the dark.

I have seen the farmer standing at the edge of his land,
his breath a brief ghost in the morning air,
and I have loved him for his silence,
for the way he trusts what he cannot yet see.

I have seen the river under its plate of ice,
still moving, still carrying its cargo of stones and silt
toward the sea—and I say to you,
this is the lesson: even what appears frozen
is traveling, is becoming, is on its way.

And you, walking through the February streets,
your coat buttoned against the wind,
your hands thrust deep in your pockets—
do you not feel it? The imperceptible turning?
The axis of the world shifting one degree toward warmth?

I feel it. I feel it in the lengthening of the afternoon,
in the quality of shadow that falls differently now
than it fell in January, a shade less absolute,
a fraction more forgiving.

O February! Month of contradictions!
Month of thaw and refreeze, of false springs
and true endurance, of the crocus that pushes
its green spear through the crust of old snow
and does not ask permission.

I am that crocus. You are that crocus.
We are all of us pushing through.

I catalogue the signs: the cardinal's red assertion
against the white field, the chickadee's two-note song
that sounds like fee-bee, fee-bee,
as if the bird itself were calling spring by name.

The puddle at the crossroads catching sky.
The icicle releasing one slow drop, then another.
The child pressing a mitten to the window,
breathing a circle of fog on the glass
and drawing a sun inside it.

These are my America. These are my verses.

I do not separate the grand from the small—
for what is grander than a single drop of water
finding its way from ice to earth to root to stem
to the flower that will open in April
and turn its face to the light
as I turn my face to the light
as you turn your face to the light?

Comrades, I say to you: endure.
The light is returning. It has always been returning.
Every February proves it.
Every dawn is an argument against despair.

I celebrate the pale light, the stubborn light,
the light that does not shout but simply arrives,
quiet as a hand on a shoulder,
quiet as a promise kept.