in Just- 

spring          when the world is mud- 

luscious …

E.E. Cummings

Severe cold came in January for a week and then snow fell from the heavens and stayed for a while like it was smothering with an alien simplicity all that was impure in our world, until the snow itself became crunchy and differentiated, complicated, besmirched with brown stains. The kids made stuff with it. Finally one night the temperature rose well above zero and with the help of a bit of rain all the whiteness was gone.

But the birds always know spring is coming just before St Brigid’s Day. There were buds and baby flowers which with my daughter back in the day I had so much time to observe. There was a full “Wolf moon” at the end of January, spectacularly regaling the whole black sky. Our youngest said her teacher said that it was the moon and “those white stipjes” were stars. I worked out she was remembering something said when she was three.

The children have energy and we have no time for it and the most important things are neglected moving from task to task, body and mind seemingly on special measures.Nothing seems new; it rings suddenly true now the cliché, reflecting on how long ago a long device-free walk over the hills somewhere alone with the wind and scraggy landscape, how that would be enough for me.

Cummings’s poem combines playfulness and looming menace, while the kids gambol in the sticky thawing earth,

the little 

lame balloonman 

whistles          far          and wee 

He’s the constant presence, the poet reminds us three times.The coming storm.