Has it really been almost three weeks since I posted a poem on the porch? It turns out it has, but National Poetry Month is around the corner, and I might try to be ready for it. There’s a new poem up today, in any case, courtesy of Mother Nature and the resilience of her creations.

We had an inch or so of snow on Thursday morning. I had to drive to work in it, walking through a slushy parking lot in indoor suede shoes to get inside. But it was followed by sunshine, glorious sunshine, and by the time I emerged from the building for my drive home you might not even have known it had snowed. Except on the shady patio to the side of my house, where it still coated the aging Adirondack chairs when dusk rolled around.

When I emerged from my front door for my after-work walk, I discovered the forsythia newly covered in blossoms not yet open but large and decidedly forsythia yellow. She is ready to bloom, and bloom she will, undeterred by snow or wind. I hope when she is fully in bloom we will have more days of glorious sunshine to adorn her, to adore her.

I’m nearly finished reading Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows. I’m sad to say I had a slow start with this book, which it didn’t deserve, as it is a gorgeous piece of writing and a love song to our natural world. It begs you to slow your thinking, let time take its natural, slow progression, be one with all the world around you. It’s a book I normally would devour, then probably go back and read again more slowly, and I think my slow start was due to my own state of mind, anxious and perhaps brittle, ill suited to contemplation—it certainly was no reflection on the book itself. Years back, I read Nick Hornby’s Stuff I’ve Been Reading, a diary-like series of essays on what he was reading, and aside from making me add a lot of books to my own reading wish list what has most stuck with me from it is Hornby’s recognition that writing and reading are a two-way dialogue, and sometimes we are simply not ready personally to read a particular book, that this isn’t a reflection of the book’s quality, that what might seem a dull or even badly written book to us might in fact just be a book that we have come to at the wrong time. My start with The Comfort of Crows was like that. I knew from the first essay that I loved it, but my mind wasn’t fully immersed, and I found myself getting up and walking away from it after each essay, not to savor and think about what I’d read but simply because I was not ready for contemplation.

That has shifted in the last couple of days, and I have been reading as much of this book at a time as I can squeeze into the parts of my days that are available for reading. I think I might have the book itself to thank for slowing me down, settling my mind, and that is why this post is titled as it is, borrowing from Renkl’s own “Praise Song…” mini-essays (contemplations?) sprinkled throughout the book. This may be a book that I buy after reading my borrowed library copy; I may want to keep it around to revisit.

Today I’m grateful for…

• Libraries
• Bird song
• The end to the thunder and rain that so tormented Elwood earlier in the week