Large Fierce Mammal

The rising Sun reveals jewels of ice tipping the branches of Maple trees at the LFM Enclave on the first calendar day of Spring, 2015. (LFM photo – click to enbiggen)

“Oddly enough, this poem was born from an intention to write something with a pretty beginning that set the reader up for a funny punch line involving the way Spring unveils just how much frozen dog shit has been slumbering under the snow and ice in our yard, and that blessed day when Nature does Her Big Reveal. As it turns out, today was the day.” ~ Spring

With those words, I introduced my poem titled Spring back on 6 March 2011, and that you might want to read or reread before going any further. I wrote it when the arrival of that season was still consistent with a decades long perception of normalcy that had spawned a sense of Natural entitlement, at least among the Human population of the World. That has now been more or less put to rest as we plod snow-shod toward a very different Spring. One that will require the melting of more than 6 feet of snow depth in some places before the true measure of Winter’s privation can be revealed in the form of remains left behind by those things that simply couldn’t wait any longer.

For my own part, I’ve been around long enough to know the Winter just past as the normalcy of my childhood, when we kids were playing “king of the castle” flinging snowballs in defence of battlements built atop the lofty snowbanks thrown up by the plough that cleared the school parking lot, and this all before Christmas break. I remember hiking in to fish lakes and stillwaters when the blooming of May Flowers, the swarming of Blackflies, and a few deep and persistently slow melting snow drifts, all coexisted in the deepest woods of a Nova Scotia May.

Dark thoughts for the introduction to a decidedly undark bit of verse, inspired by the serendipitous sighting of an oddly shaped Dog turd, but that’s the me you all have come to love, so here’s today’s rhyme.

Nature’s Jocularity

By LFM

A warming breeze blew through my yard
And showed me something funny.
A turd the melting snow revealed
Looks like a choc’late bunny.