Spring

 

   . . .

When winter days be through,

spring recurs and bears fruits,

perched on sticks and shoots,

dusting a frost from the roots.

 

Seasons march on the Onodrim.

Barrenness ravaged the Entings,

and its drought uprooted saplings,

and the trees need growing things.

 

When spring walks with Onodrim,

the trees regard her among them.

When spring becomes of Onodrim,

the trees baptise her one of them.

 

So whistles the

CHANGELING,

"O, what thing are you?"

 

So whispers the

CHANGELING,

"How changed are you?"

 

Spring wore her face like a garden,

and the freckles sprout like weeds,

and do elicit encroaching thickets,

where pastures pervade the green.

 

Screams from the deluge of a burbling creek

smear fingers sodden and a sticky pout pink.

 

Trailing lashes found the basins of the eyes,

not unlike creeping ivies, which glittered as

bulbous black seeds settled in the meadow

of a doll face—which is not real porcelain,

although its likeness is not to be mistaken.

 

It is those eyes, prismatic, possessed of dew,

like glistening wells that draw watery sunlight,

which dimple the smile and its many teeth too.

 

The raveling tangles swallowed whole the

ruddy ears and rosy countenance, and the

very pinkness of this creature suffused her,

 

down to the bristle of leather-skinned feet,

where the hairs be grey as opossum wool;

to little pink fists and the fits of knuckles;

to the fleshy pit of belly on a body petite;

 

and the dirty terrace of her cheeks cast in

red rose with a mischievous curl of the lip

 

  —

 

her head becomes the swallow-bird nests,

which squat on feathers, twigs, and burrs.

The morass of hair is wreathed with wood,

all paper leaves, and labyrinths from mud.

 

This changeling whom the fay bring

sows trouble like a plot in the earth,

and laughs, so wild, as wilds ought.

SPRING is what the forests brought.

   . . .