Spring came late this year to Connecticut with mornings still in the 40s. We hosted an exchange student from Spain and she experienced her first snow in April, not once but twice.  It was just the right amount to cover the ground, dust branches, and melt by afternoon.

April is National Poetry Month, a perfect season to inspire even when its snowy.  Here is Poet Laureate Billy Collins.

Today

by Billy Collins

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.

Spring is a season for breaking out. Like the inhabitants locked in the paperweight, after wintry captivity, we need to throw up the windows, rip open the doors, and get out into the larger dome of blue and white.

Blooming Barbies and rubber duckies rejoice beneath the larger dome of spring  in Washington, D.C.  (Logan Circle)