Spring is angry,
It does not care about your poems,
It says it won’t be delivering bees or flowers for inspiration,
It cries for its dead and unnaturally wilted,
And the monoxide you’ve been feeding it.
This April,
Spring is closed for visitors,
There’s a huge sign hanging from its fragile petals, “until further notice”.
And when your words will start to leak of emptiness ,
Without the chrysanthemums and the swelling streams,
You will realize that your poems in April were courtesy of the bloom and color,
As you sit by the window on the 23rd day,
Chin resting easy on your palm,
Waiting for a knock,
Like an April fool.
April this year,
has a sense of finality -
a smell of disinfectants and disease,
a sound of thousand reticent crows
disturbed from their sleep
in the middle of the night,
by a lumberjack in a green hazmat suit.
April has a mask,
has a past,
is a person this year.
April whispers lullabies in the death bed -
nothing is painful anymore,
nothing is here anymore.
The clock is stuck at two,
men and women howl
from their miserable, shackled lives
in small and big houses
made of footsteps that brought them here.
The cemetery has bones and souls,
the fire is tired of burning.
The urns have ashes,
the rivers do not stop churning.
April parades on the river bank,
eager, thirsty, mournful -
an eight-legged person on a mission.
April was supposed to be
Wind and wind chimes, flowers and sunsets,
Walking a dear one down the aisle
With love and hope, joy and kisses.
It was supposed to be
His soft lips and my trembling heart,
Us stealing a little part
Of something that’s not ours to keep.
It was supposed to be about
Exploring the shores of our trust,
Seeing a new wonder with the closest ones,
But here we are instead
Cleaning corners and clearing cobwebs,
Sweeping, wiping, cooking, breathing
Being tender to parts we’ve neglected most,
And this too is a lesson in trust
May be not the one we expected,
But the one we need to learn before all is lost.
-Lana
May this May be indelible.
May June make us imbibe our scarred senses.
May July help us know we need to die inside.
May August teach us there are no renewals, only resurrections.
May September be when our beings spring alien flowers.
May October make us know closed doors do open.
May November help us know there is still warmth to be found.
May December be when we find that even new sanctuaries can be home.
But first, may we survive the solitude of April.
A waterfall spouts from my eyes
Pours poetry in my casket
Roses refuse to wilt even in my grave
Instead, I
Learn to bloom towards the sun with them.
Oh April, what have you?//
To what do I owe April to?
The restlessness I can't shrug off.
The silence ready to eat me up.
The feeling of forever being stuck.
and a million thoughts running amuck.
No, I will stop you right there,
let's rewind the tape, write April a memoir.
April, Aperire, Aphrilis or Aphrodite
origin of the name has a few maybe
't is the month signifying sweet pea and daisy
symbolising love, pleasure, innocence, purity.
April marks Shakespeares' birth, and his demise too
a genius otherwise, maybe stole a plot or two
but I will remember him for his poetic virtue
for he taught us to listen to many, talk to a few.
Hitler reminds me of agony, I will give him a pass.
Rather indulge in Strange fits of passion by William Wordsworth,
the poet who gave Romantic Age in English Literature, its birth
April he entered the world, also when he slept under this earth.
Remember Noah, man behind Merriam-Webster, copyrighted April 1828.
Reformed spellings by removing the redundant, playing with the vowels
while bred for bread, frend for friend, masheen for machine took a pinch of denial
center, color, plow, draft, among many others, sing their songs of survival.
I will also remember April of the year 2020, call it a relic.
When we wore masks, banged our plates, burnt our candles
stayed home, alone if need be, but fought the battle
the month of collective hope, the month of revival.
Did you enjoy going down the memory lane?
Let's end the poem with a verse from April Song by Sara Teasdale.
Willow, in your April gown
Delicate and gleaming,
Do you mind in years gone by
All my dreaming?
this april isn't like others
i'm home after ages
so is a monsoon
that's arrived before summer
night after night
i open my windows
to the rumbling thunder from east
it sounds more musical
than a symphony
the lightening begins to crack the sky
the frogs come out from the hiding
against the pattering rain
they croak and call for love
i listen to the crickets
and insects whose name
i've forgotten with the city-life
what's not lost is
my love
for the brisk wind
for the sweet faint smell of mud and grass
i take it all in,
looking at the grey - blue sky
waiting for the flash of lights
drifting into memories of
a carefree childhood
this april is a dreamscape.
When the April ends
All I want to do is
Fill my heart with
Softness of Gulmohar