In this week’s poem, Suzanne Langlois celebrates the glorious advent of the warm months. I love this poem’s revelry in light, colors and textures so indelible, so wonderfully tangible, that they stain fingers and run rich with juice.

Langlois’ collection “Bright Glint Gone” won the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance chapbook award. Her work has appeared in Leon Literary Review, Cider Press Review, Scoundrel Time and in the 2022 Best New Poets Anthology. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Seasonal
By Suzanne Langlois

Blessed is the first day warm enough
for sandals and shorts, the body
breaking free from its winter fetters,
hard buds breaking into leaf.
A day sweet as a ripe peach, the bleak
gray-scale of winter replaced with forsythia,
lilac, hyacinth—colors so bright and solid,
I could bite into them and feel juice
on my chin. Fingers red from hulling
strawberries, shoulders pink under
the sun’s hot palm, everything I own
dusted golden with pollen.
Hard to believe that two months
from now, the ceiling fan will stutter
its apology for not making the day
bearable, a temperature that doesn’t
cling to the back of my neck like a leech.
Harder still to believe that a few months
after that, the sun will refuse to touch me,
pretend it never even knew my name.
Today it rises early, just to give itself
more time to love my skin, and I am
soil unburdened by snow, a crocus
bolting headlong into bloom,
a firefly that’s never seen a jar.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “No One Taught Us Lifelong Love,” © 2023 by Suzanne Langlois, was originally published in West Trestle. It appears by permission of the author.