It’s late May
and my shoulders are
bare and burnt again,
though the southeast humidity
has yet to seep under
the skin of tidewater,
the kinder air of spring still
stirring us gently forward.
The evenings already lounge
well past eight but
as we close in on sixty,
we muse on the back porch
in our jammies,
the better to rise
with the first reach of dawn
and the first trill of birds
rousing from our privet hedge
now in full allergic flame.
Yes, the better to indulge
in the earliest inclinations
of this first summer
post-pandemic as it emerges
in quick cadence
with the seventeen-year cycle
of cicadas whose urgent,
fungi-induced chorus of arrival
we have yet to hear.
But we will.
WordShelter.com 