To the Peepers in the Wetlands

I heard the first chorus of peepers tonight. If the red-winged blackbirds are the sign of winter’s end, then the peepers are the sign of spring’s beginning. Tonight there were just a few beginners running up their limited scale. Soon, the wetlands behind us will be a tabernacle choir.

Here's a poem I wrote four years ago. It must have been an early warm spell in late March 2000 because first hearing then was March 23, which is also the day my father died in 1973.

For any of you interested in these things, the poem is written in trochaic tetrameter, which, if you let your ear go dancing, you will recognize as the meter of a certain Longfellow poem.

Twenty-Third of March Hereafter
3/23/2000

Standing still in March, you listen
to the peepers in the wetlands
sounding like alarm clocks going
off and wonder who they're waking.
Not the living who lie sleeping
even though the spring approaches,
but the dead. The dead are waking
in the woodlands. Trees are budding;
eastern pines are sprouting needles.
Buzz of bees and song of blackbirds
flower in the meadows. Shadows
disappear in light, and sunshine
lingers in the later sunsets.
Even ghosts wake in my late night
whims. My father comes among them,
dead for twenty-seven years now,
busy playing cribbage, counting
out his years in fifteen-twos and
never mourning over pegging out.