Walking down an early-spring mountain
As if traveling between seasons.
Approaching warmth and green
While passing over melting snow
Interspersed with leafy detritus.
Learning the method of resurrection
As the things locked away
Slowly open again.
The mountain streams and rushing rivulets
Freshly materializing from blank snow;
A melodious flux and change
Newly recalled into existence.
The snow has taught us
The price of resurrection,
The bitter winter winds
Have made the stakes visceral.
Yet, there is no bitterness to this memory,
In the warmly whispered words
Of spring’s sustained sunlight.
With the snow no longer foreboding
Now only accentuating coming warmth.
What is, then,
The method of resurrection?
Apparently sudden
But growing silently and subtly
Long before its appearance.
It’s rooted in the deepest and coldest winter night
It must have been growing then
Though we did not know it,
And could not see it.
Resurrection’s ways are surely her own
But swell to a sweet cacophony
Of a thousand voices.
Perhaps in the end we can only guess her methods
As we judge each by its resonance to season’s movements,
Which moves us.
If celestial bodies can tug at terrestrial ones
This vernal resurrection
Has a bright gravity to it
And all we can do is trace its orbit.
Adam works as a substitute teacher and helps to edit and manage The Utah Monthly, an online newsletter dedicated to Utah politics, ideas, religions, cultures, and environment. He will begin law school this fall and hopes to eventually work for an environmental advocacy organization or government agency focused on environmental issues. Adam loves walking, bird-watching, reading, and learning more about the small corner of the world he lives in (Wendell Berry was right when he wrote: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul”). To read more of Adam’s work, visit his personal blog A Wondering Disconent
