When Summer Comes

I bury their heads in peat and think of the day
When the sun warms the soil and the clouds bring the rain
and the white snowy fields that once seemed to stretch endless
will be a fuzzy memory of a cold and irrelevant past.
The seeds so carefully planted before the first frost will
unfold like origami and send thin furry roots tunneling
through the chilly dirt to find footholds in the earth.
I'll wake to find a thin coat of green covering
the warmed soil surrounding the base of the old birch tree
in the back yard.

Eventually, the thin frost of green will grow into a thick carpet,
obscuring the domed hills marking the entrance and exit of traveling worms,
the triangular footprints of excavating seasonal birds,
even the occasional fox footpad, preserved in wet mud.
But today, snow falls in soft clumps outside my kitchen window,
barely heard or felt by the tiny cocooned bodies of insects and plants
lying dormant beneath the soil. I stare past the snow
dream bright, grand dreams of far-off summer days,
imagining the crackle of night crawlers moving beneath decomposing leaves,
the way the stars look so fuzzy in the sky
on hazy, summer nights.