Karen Arnold

April

Karen Arnold

Today in rooms of mauve and quiet light a Yin deficiency swims to the surface This does not surprise me I’m lacking in compliance

Voices inside my head hold conversations about needing time needing to write needing to be another needing to be a wife needing to be a mother resisting surrender at every chance

In three days trees have gone from stick straight to newly green and fat so new that variegated greens mark roadsides dark grass, brittle with winter’s cold not edged out by fuller growth

Inside groves Dogwoods slant plates of petals toward the sun absorbing air and light through branches thickening with leaves –hold themselves like dancers gesturing into late April warmth

Perhaps they are model trees who reach full, delicate greenness poised upward toward a promised new beginning

They bloom blood red at centers where seeds and pollen mix content to seem fragile insubstantial suspended

In weeks this quality will disappear Dogwood Yin balanced between winter’s deep slumber and full blown green year after year surrenders content to raise

full graceful forms echo poets in the world grow light rising to fertile branching Yang

Karen Arnold lives and writes from Columbia, Maryland.