You startled me by the path this morning,
Unfurling to greet the sun.
It seems much too early for this brand of leafy, Spring-green optimism
where red wine leaves dropped just yesterday.
I sip my coffee.
I walk on.
I worry for you.
The cold will bite back, I warn you from over my shoulder as I go.
I hope against my own soul’s joy that soft, cool, gray clouds might tuck you in to sleep just a little longer.
Your sisters nearby are bursting into poofs of soft white and ever-so-subtle pink.
They didn’t think to wake you.
So you strive, ready or not, to get going.
Spring waits for no one.
Are there enough stores, I wonder, in that long cream-colored root of yours,
that underground, mirror image of yourself stretched deep into the earth – to get you through?
Could you even soak it all up in that brief, wet winter when rain puddled like lakes in the dips and ditches around you?
Was your dreaming phase long enough to revisit the wisdom and relearn the stories embedded in all your cells—both young and old?
Did you jot it all down and send it streaming through those inner highways that stretch up and out to even your littlest green shoot to keep her safe along her journey?
When the chatter of Spring becomes the hot roar of summer, and the only way out will be through,
Will your stores of water yield tips like sugar to restore you and remind you of the ways you’ve made before?
Or will you dare, sweet green thing, to brave it all with the arrogance of youth whose time has simply come?