The change is real tonight, the buds are swelling above, the green is coming alive below, the air is damp in the way only spring air can be damp. It’s really not official yet, but winter, you are down for the count.
One image that always comes to me when I think of spring involves driving south out of Minneapolis in late winter on a small highway that follows the Mississippi River. The Oklahoma Poet and I were heading home from a gathering of poets and small press distributors. I was technically both.
We had just heard Robert Bly close out the event and were driving home along a frozen body of water that divides our continent. We were full of poetry and a fierce love of the land that we had just driven the breadth of.
There was a sharp drop-off from the road down to the river. Just past Red Wing, we took a bend in the highway and saw a giant bird angle over the road ahead of us and follow the drop-off down to the river. When you see an eagle, you instantly know it’s an eagle.
This was the magic spot where the ice was breaking up, where spring had come to wave her wand over the the Land of Lakes. On the edge of the still-frozen river below us, with the bright blue waters of the Mississippi gushing out of it winter lodgings, was a dozen Bald Eagles deftly snatching fish as they rejoiced in the lovely spring oxygen. We parked and pulled out our lunch and watched them for an hour or more.
Her poem from that trip was published in her last book. “Remember The Land” it’s called. She passed away a dozen years ago.
I think of that poem, and that poet, each year when spring comes to the Great Plains. I remember giant birds dancing in brittle pine air, a mighty river breaking free from months of silence, and simple poems, in human cadence, that came to live inside our souls.