Spring is close, readers. And this week’s poem, by Laura Bonazzoli, revels in its approach. This poem’s rich and luminous imagery, its scents, sounds and light, feel like gifts, as does its breathless forward momentum toward rebirth.
Bonazzoli is a freelance writer and editor and teaches English at The Watershed School in Camden. Her poetry has appeared in Connecticut River Review, Reed Magazine, Slant and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in “Balancing Act 2: An Anthology of Poetry by Fifty Maine Women” and “A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis.”
Even now
we begin again.
Perhaps dawn calls us
a breeze through an open window
fragrance of orchard and honey
the clacking of crows.
Perhaps as we rise
still webbed in dream
we dare again to anticipate
touch.
The morning understands.
Even now its ancient
worms monarchs crows
press on
toward their ineluctable bliss
its gnarled
apple trees
quake
with heedless and holy expectancy
of light
of warmth
of bee to brush their blossoms’ yearning
dust
into ovaries
into fruit again
seeds again
their dark embryos dreaming
of some beloved purpose.
— Laura Bonazzoli
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Even Now,” copyright © 2019 by Laura Bonazzoli. It appears by permission of the author.
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