April / Ernest Howard Crosby

April

See the apple-orchard
Bathing head and shoulders
In the dazzling pea-green
Rising-tide of April;
While an ancient pear tree
In the kitchen garden
Spreads the rugged outline
Of its jet-black branches
Underneath a drifted
Mass of snowy blossoms.
Tinted is the herbage
With unnumbered violets.
Tiny sky-blue butterflies
Like uprooted flowrets
Flirt among the sunbeams.
Hickory-tips are bursting
Into clustering parachutes.
On the white-oak saplings
Pink and folded leaflets
Now uncurl their tendrils
Like the opening iingers
Of soft new-born babies.
Listen, from the marshes
Multitudinous frog notes
Ringing out metallic
Like the ghosts of sleigh-bells;
While a red-winged blackbird,
Eager to be mating,
From a bare twig bugles,
"O-kal-ee,— it's April!"

~~
Ernest Howard Crosby (1856-1907)
from Broad-cast, 1905

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

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