Welcome to the March 2014 Poem of the Month!
We say goodbye to what has been an incredibly busy month for us. Soccer has featured prominently in March, between my son’s two high school games a week and the opening of the Seattle Sounders season (the latter has been for a few years now a hallmark farther/son event for Alex and I, and occasionally a father/daughter event for Emma and I).
Work trips to San Francisco and Phoenix seemed to devour about half the month – the only silver lining being the from the record-breaking March rainfall in Seattle.
Filing our taxes, spring gardening, spring cleaning, house projects… all these seemed to crowd into every moment of March.
Every now and then, I stumble back across a poem that suddenly helps me return my world to some sense of perspective. Tess Gallagher’s poem “Choices” did that last week, and thought it both an appropriate send off to March, and an aspirational welcome to Spring.
Tess Gallagher
(1943 – )
Choices
I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
