By Zara Q., TIWP Student

My English summer reading tells me,
“Every good poet needs a good spring poem,”
then goes on to say there’s no way to make them original,
and therefore their captivation to the audience has ceased to be nothing,
and I guess poetry is dead.

So tell me
why are we assigning value to a poem?
Why are we always telling a poet what they must write?
Why are we chipping away at our heart and our soul for a product and not the process?

But anyways,
here’s my spring poem.
I hope you enjoy:

There isn’t really a spring in the San Francisco Bay Area.
There’s cold, a little less, fog, sun, 
and the horrible hot and dry monstrosity that is autumn,
and when the wind blows then,
so does the smoke from the fires we burn.

To us, spring in a construct.
A time to clean out the piles you’ve neglected,
or to plant tomatoes in the yard that’s falling apart.
A time when the shelters say there’s more litters of cats to be fostered than ever before,
when we all know they flow through foster homes like a river does its valley.
All year round.

Spring is hope, spring is stress.
Spring is the reminder that we should care a little more,
and yet care a little less.
Spring is the final sprint until we reach summer,
it is the end of the old and the start of new beginnings.
It reminds us of the places we used to frequent,
the parks we used to believe in.

Spring is the sun that warms our planet 
and the clouds that cool the bay like a comforting blanket.
A trip to Monterey,
it is flipping through calendars to a photo of flowers,
it is the year-old whale that washes up on the beach one day.
The months of hours of towers of going and going and going-
Spring is the rest we want to love but are paid to hate.

Spring was the birth of the newborn,
the rise of the daughter and the resting of an elder.
It was a smile, a laugh, a song,
a prayer that blessed the coming days,
a memory that faded like the freezing rain.
Spring used to mean something.

Years ago, to me it was a countdown,
10, 9, 8 days until another year has passed.
7, 6, 5 moments to wait to blow out the candles of my birthday cake.
4, 3, 2 realizations that I don’t want to grow older.
1 life I get to live that is spinning around the sun faster each time we reach this season.

To someone else,
spring was baby goats and a stronger sun and good morning everyone!
It was vanilla pudding and taking the warm weather clothes out from storage,
and the purple of lavender or the yellow of daisies and the blades of grass.

Now that same little girl has deeper, darker, greener eyes.
She sees spring from the summer to come, and then autumn, and then winter.
She sees the videos or her younger sibling’s puppet shows she had to delete from her phone,
just to save gigabytes,
the dust collecting on her old toys,
the independence or maybe loneliness or honestly just a childhood lost to the world.
Lost to the season we call spring,
won by the regret of promises we failed to keep,
of the catapult of comparison drifting through the air like pollen to our noses,
sneezed out as an insecurity we never needed.
This is my spring;
full of goodbyes.