Early Spring Storm

Darts of ice are stinging the road under
the headlights, and striking my windshield;
in this dusky cavern, it’s only noon,
but the Housatonic’s taking the sleet
between the slick sheets of her stony bed.
The stubble fields half-hidden in darkness
come naked to this storm, a kind of love,
greening the land, slaking the sighing pines
and sending up the cumulonimbus.
Each summer my neighbor’s roses burst out
in blooms of salmon, mauve, and white; a storm
like this would strip them back to thorn.
Are these, too, the ways of love? So they prick
the petals of our scented loveliness.

***

Zara Raab’s books are Fracas & Asylum, Swimming the Eel, Rumpelstiltskin, or What’s in a Name? and The Book of Gretel, narrative poems of Northern California where she grew up. Her work, including reviews and essays, as well as poems, has appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Verse Daily, River Styx,Crab Orchard Review, Raven Chronicles, and The Dark Horse. She lives in western Massachusetts.