Monday 12 August 2019

Leafing Up

Damp, dank and dingy, this cold March day
Cannot stop the bushes having their way,
Leafing up in the morning gloom
Like a green mist drifting in coil and plume.

All winter, the shrubs with branches bare
Have rattled in the thumping ice-stark air,
Now, with nosegays of salad-green,
They are leafing up in a rain-crisp sheen.

Be it the hawthorn with its blood-snag spines
Or the osier willow in fingering lines,
Mintily-tinted where insects will tup,
Springward, the bushes are leafing up.

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© March 2015