Here's some cute pictures:

 Memory of spring takes me to childhood.
 I learned my first adult sounding poem in fourth grade from Mrs. Dubois. Her father was the state poet laureate. Not a great poet-I ought to go read him now-I might find it better. But I read him in our newspaper. She was a year from her retirement. He was in his 90s then and she took care of him. Probably she was about my age now, or maybe 64. I'm 56. She had us recite poems. I'd swear I knew every word of this poem by heart, but I'd be wrong. This poem I recall as "First Spring" but it is First Sight and is by Phillip Larkin. 

This is how I recall it, which I think is important because I rather like what I did to the poem over my many years. 

Lambs that learn to walk in snow

When their bleating clouds the air

Meet a solemn stillness

Know nothing but a soundless glare

All they meet outside the fold
 Is a wretched width of cold

As they wait beside the ewe

Their fleeces wryly cakes

There lies hidden round them waiting too

Earth's  immeasurable surprise

They could not grasp it if they knew

What so soon would wake and grow

Utterly unlike the snow. 

To this day the poem captures almost everything in life I learned from a farm my father had once and the feeling of my childhood. It is epitomized in spring. 

And yet it is about the winter and the things we cannot know.
It is about the frailty of our knowing in the midst of this universe unrevealed.
It is about our ignorance and innocence.
And considering the fate of lambs it is about even more-the loss of their brief lives introduces yet another level.
To me the poem said everything in terms I could understand in the physical realm.

But here is the real poem. 

More beautiful perhaps:

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

Poetry spoke to me early on in my life. 

We seem to be in times when a blast of cold wind is chilling our art to its bones. The trumpeting and the burning, extremes that should speak instead through our poets.
This burning trumpet eclipse our voice.

We need poets. Sheep and lions. We need to integrate our souls really. We need to fashion poems to help us understand such artless times.