Ellen Lager
Emergence
Inert pines trim a purple-peach horizon,
dawn’s woodcut sky. A coating of white ice pellets
spritzed the lawn overnight. In the first lance of sunlight,
a thousand gems conspire with crystals of snow.
The wind carries the guttural voice of lake ice cracking,
sheer glass fractures, stacks the far shoreline.
This is nature on the brink of release, bred to shed needles
along the winter-whisked trail where I run the dogs.
Two mallards ripple the thin margin of open shore,
dip into the mire of last year’s bulrush.
Soft mud imprinted with deer tracks reveals one small bud
of a princess pine, a tiny faith, its fernlike tentacles
reaching hesitantly toward earth’s greater mending.
In the distance, the keyboard pecking of a hairy woodpecker
awakens the forest. Chickadees unfold feathers
from warm birch cavities, vine through black branches
rigid with the rime of last night’s freeze
rousing dead tree stumps, velvety with spring mosses
glowing green.
