Poetry Season

For a fast month, we harvest poems,
April-ripe and urgently bursting,
our baskets stretched with letters,
with words, with finely worked lines.
We gather our treasures together,
share them, mix them, lick our fingers
as we linger on the long notes,
rejoicing in the juice of songs.
Around us, the ground catches
the leaves, the snatches of sound, the seeds
that fall, almost unnoticed, from our pens,
and then — and then! — they sprout,
the sharp green words come shooting out,
and verse begins again.