The Cycle of the seasons

Travel to the southern hemisphere has left me with season lag - as they move from beautiful spring toward languid summer, I must return to the beginning of winter. That is why exploding aardvark's poem quotation has such resonance for me as I wait for Spring.

"Lilacs, forsythia, apple blossoms:
their pleasure consists less
in their being there than in our sense
of their seasonal recurrence,
There is no such reassurance
in the regularities of the planets,
even our own, but the first crocus
under a familiar tree, that's something
that gives the simplest soul
an identity worth having:"

- excerpted from "Homes, Prisons, and Hotels: The Geography of Private Life for Jose Padilla and his torturers" by Tom Disch

Disch's poem goes on to contrast this cycle with the probably unlawful imprisonment of Jose Padilla (even criminals, especially criminals, have habeas corpus rights). A prisoner is prohibited from the simple experience described at the beginning of the poem. Evil must be confronted in this life, and many are doing so in this case. At least give these people a trial.

Right now, I prefer to focus on the deep feeling of time and the random tossing of fate ( as expressed by not having reassurance in even the regularity of our own planets) that Disch expresses so well in these first lines of his work.

tags: Spring, poetry, science fiction