Something about the coming of spring has always felt to me incredibly well-suited to poetry, as though it serves as an enchantment, calling the earth slowly back to life through incantation. As we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month, here is another poem from Mary Oliver, whose ability to blend the natural world with a sense of hope and renewal appropriately beckons the arrival of spring in Worm Moon. The title alludes to the first full moon in March, so-called because earthworms begin to show themselves again once the ground starts to thaw. Oliver makes the sensations of the transition palpable, both visual and sensual, as the winter stars slide away and the breeze blows over fields and bodies. You can feel her buoyancy in the italicized joyful, you can discern her sentiments without pretense in the final line. And that final sentiment is one, right now, that I’m willing to believe.

Worm Moon

1

In March the earth remembers its own name. Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking. The rivers begin to sing. In the sky the winter stars are sliding away; new stars appear as, later, small blades of grain will shine in the dark fields. And the name of every place is joyful.

2

The season of curiosity is everlasting and the hour for adventure never ends, but tonight even the men who walked upon the moon are lying content by open windows where the winds are sweeping over the fields, over water, over the naked earth, into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

3

because it is spring; because once more the moon and the earth are eloping – a love match that will bring forth fantastic children who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run over the surface of earth; who will believe, for years, that everything is possible.

4

Born of clay, how shall a man be holy; born of water, how shall a man visit the stars; born of the seasons, how shall a man live forever?

5

Soon the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft, will enter his life from the tiny egg. On his delicate legs he will run through the valleys of moss down to the leaf mold by the streams, where lately white snow lay upon the earth like a deep and lustrous blanket of moon-fire,

6

and probably everything is possible.

– Mary Oliver

From Twelve Moons

From poets.org

by William Shakespeare – 1564-1616

The three witches, casting a spell

Round about the cauldron go;   
In the poison’d entrails throw.   
Toad, that under cold stone    
Days and nights hast thirty one   
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,   
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.   

     Double, double toil and trouble; 
     Fire burn and cauldron bubble.   

Fillet of a fenny snake,   
In the cauldron boil and bake;   
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,   
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,   
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,   
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,   
For a charm of powerful trouble, 
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.   

     Double, double toil and trouble;   
     Fire burn and cauldron bubble.  

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,      
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf     
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,     
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,     
Liver of blaspheming Jew,      
Gall of goat, and slips of yew     
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,     
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,     
Finger of birth-strangled babe      
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,     
Make the gruel thick and slab:     
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,     
For the ingredients of our cauldron.

     Double, double toil and trouble;   
     Fire burn and cauldron bubble.  

Close to the Goddess

From allpoetry.com

For me this thought goes with my daily mantra or affirmation,

“Positive Thoughts bring about Positive Actions which make me feel better!”