April 2022 PAD Challenge: "Early Bird"

 I'm back again for the annual Poem-a-Day Challenge, which officially begins tomorrow! I'll be following NaPoWriMo, Maureen Thorson's blog, and Robert Lee Brewer's blog, Write Better Poetry, as usual. Maureen today has an "early bird" prompt, to write a poem in response to a line from Emily Dickinson. She suggested five choices and I used one of them.

It's already been a big year for me poetically: My first-ever full-length poetry collection, The Bungalow of Colorful Aging, has been published! (See my prior post.) It's available through Amazon.com or directly through the publisher at kelsaybooks.com. I also have a new chapbook coming out soon, Knit Our Broken Bones, from Maverick Duck Press, based on the poems I wrote during the November 2020 Chapbook Challenge from Robert Lee Brewer, in a form called hay(na)ku. I'll also be participating in an artist and author festival in my home town this May, and the Collingswood (NJ) Book Festival in October, and I hope to start doing in-person readings again, although I will be part of a virtual reading for Kelsay Books in July. And I'm currently working on a series of poems based on the songs of the British rock band Elbow.

Anyway, here is today's poem:

Survivors

 

To be a Flower, is profound / Responsibility –

Emily Dickinson
 
The weather people warned us:
hard freeze the next two nights,
brutal weather for early spring.
 
Cover or bring in your potted plants,
they said, and as for your flowering trees,
the blossoms may die on the branch.
 
Yet most of my flowers have survived
two nights of frost and cutting north winds -
the crocuses and daffodils still poke their heads
defiantly up from icy ground,
 
and the cherry tree in our yard, though wilted,
hasn't yet shed its pink spring apparel.
 
It's as if they know this year more than ever
that they are responsible for our happiness.