When I say “March,” the word evokes different memories and emotions than when I say “April.” Over the course of my career, I’ve written about a range of feelings—relief, despair, the hope and horror of love—in poetry, reporting, and prose. As part of a yearlong series for the Scholar, each month I am contributing a new poem to a sonnet cycle, marking the changing seasons in the rhyme and meter of an Elizabethan sonnet.
March
Crazed March is like an afterbirth come first,
like order run by chaos—too-late snow,
too-early daffodils, a mad outburst,
a raucous blast of jays, a screaming crow,
These days offend, distend, impend, portend,
the trees that thrash, the winds that cry.
This is the real world, kid, one without end.
Your car is dirty and your skin is dry.
Skies have a frantic sheen and black streams glare,
though dawns are silver now, like dawns in spring.
Forsythia and crocuses are there.
You wait to hear the birds begin to sing.
You want it to be over, like some bad
sex thing—April’s the lover, March a cad.
