The Wind Riders

We are back on campus this week so the only crazy medical stories are the ones my other 45 or so classmates and I share with one another. But, I was inspired recently by the birth of spring around me. There is nowhere quite like the Pacific Northwest in springtime. It is a wild, and reckless springtime. I think us humans feel a bit wild and reckless ourselves as we bloom right along with the world around us. This one is for LJ. 

I notice them now
arriving, listless in the nights,
scattering in the mornings, bending
on the wind, getting caught up
in the window screens, their small
orange bodies a tangle
of movement,
there are hundreds.

Where is the mother of all of these children?
Awakening from her own winter? Where she
filled the cracks in the floorboards
with her own slender legs?

Her babies will grow, through the heat and rain of summer,
through to fall, where they will collapse
greedily, into our shared space.
They’ll appear in troves,
as big as coins, shocking in their glory,
so delicate and quick.

The dawn will bring a fortress weaved of the backyard,
between hydrangea and pine, between
an old wooden ladder and
a favorite chair. And I will stand still
and silent each day
navigating the best path.

This year, I decide to grow with them,
exsanguinate life from the night, elicit a lucid, quaking
calm from the day. Knowing each moment a marker
in a short span of time. After all,
we share a growth cycle,
the wind riders and I,
even as I watch them now,
bending, individual
glistening
whispering drops

of sunlight.