Spring Comes Singing like a Troubadour

“I swear,” says one who knows me well, “when the 
angels were handing out ‘patience,’ you were lounging 
behind this shed, drinking Scotch and daydreaming.” 

Well, this is correct about the garden shed, for it is a 
fine place to greet the spring as it billows in from the west 
and illuminates the fields in freshly laundered light. 

And note too how the spring wind announces itself -- 
less like a king and more like a troubadour, strumming and
singing a perennial tune, a melody we ache for

through all the months that are not the spring. 
And as for a certain lack of patience – and here I’m putting 
it mildly, for I have as much aptitude for patience as

I have for diesel mechanics or the flying trapeze,
meaning none, though now I am merely adrift in my thoughts, 
for spring does this to folks on stray afternoons in

April, out here behind the garden shed, a bottle of 
Famous Grouse on the grass and all concerns abandoned to 
another day, enlivened by a warmth no soul has known

for months and thus what fault is impatience in this 
land of oppressive winter, for today spring is dancing a jig on the
breeze and a melody is blowing our hearts clean apart. 

- Selected by the League of Canadian Poets as the “Poetry Pause” poem for June 29, 2023