The signs of spring are around us. On Sunday we move the clocks ahead an hour and begin to fill in our NCAA tournament brackets. In the world beyond our workplace windows, nature quietly launches her ‘trickster season’.

“Spring has never been a reliable season. Some years it includes too much summer, some years too much winter, and some years too much of both.”

The Friday Poem this week comes from two time U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, who invites us to “throw open all the windows in the house” and enjoy the perfect spring day.

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

Billy Collins   Poetry Magazine,  April 2000

“Accessibility is not a word often associated with great poetry. Yet Billy Collins has managed to create a legacy from what he calls being poetically “hospitable.” Preferring lyrical simplicity to abstruse intellectualism, Collins combines humility and depth of perception, undercutting light and digestible topics with dark and at times biting humor.”  (TED 2012)