The moon is waning,
My joints are paining,
My mood is draining,
Next up will be raining.
I can’t stop thinking in verse or in rhyme;
Oppressed with the sense that I’m losing to time.
It’s a green and nipping month of May. The peonies bud tight against the cold.
And they said April was cruel. Graduation is four weeks away, and it really doesn’t feel like it. I’m teaching round two of HAMLET to restless Seniors, a poetry unit to Sophomores, and I can’t curtail the compulsion to sum up life in blank verse, rhyming couplets, or figurative language. The students are limp, pale biscuits who lack the energy to butter themselves or each other.
As is always the case at this time of year, people ask me if I’m feeling so ready for the school year to be over. My answer is always the same: No! Not that I don’t look forward to the glories of summer: time off is the ultimate luxury to be purchased with a teacher’s salary. But there is so much to do between now and then. I want the green breast of summer to be a clear horizon: unlittered with undone to-do lists, unfettered by the crippling reality that once again I didn’t get done half of what I’d hoped to this year. That, while it was a good year, it could have been better, and that, basically, I just need more time.
Yet while the days and weeks go whipping past at breakneck speed, the flowers seem to have been at a standstill. The ants started nibbling around the spheres of peony buds two weeks ago. The lilies and irises have swollen at their tips, but their sheaths of green refuse to bud. However, out of Nature’s guilt or her natural grace, the azaleas’ fireworks of color have lasted longer than ever. It’s as if She heard my desperate plea to stop time, and did all she could. Release, release, oh spring. Don’t try to fool me with your recalcitrance. Or are you waiting, like a patient friend in the wings, until the time is just right? Even if the peonies never open, I know the clock is ticking on spring. Come on, now, let us see you in all your glory!
#peonies #spring #senioritis #roughwindsdoshake #teachinghighschool #acoldmay #thedarlingbudsofmay