Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: Spring and All

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REBEL GIRL HAS LEARNED much this week including that fact that a student soliciting another student for sex does indeed violate the student code of conduct. She's not sure whether or not a student menacing another student with a large frightened domestic rabbit violates the code but it did violate Reb's sense of decorum so she put a stop to it. "Make that rabbit disappear," she instructed the slightly embarrassed student.

What can we chalk these incidents up to? Well, poor decision making, yes. But Spring is in the air here and certainly the bunny incident had all the overtones of that season: a white rabbit, sheepish males, alarmed but charmed females—all involved except the rabbit seemed pleased with themselves.

Even the presence of the Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust with their gory photos as big as doors seem to herald Spring somehow.

Spring has come to the valley of Irvine: root, grip, awaken. There's six weeks left to learn something this semester.

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Today's poem is from William Carlos Williams, a poet I first read in high school because he had that Carlos sitting there between his Williams.

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

[1923]