Spring, an homage

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the
Starnbergersee
With a show of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt
deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the
archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened.  He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.


The Wasteland (lines 1 through 18)  T.S. Eliot

Moon in the morning hangs semi-transparent in the blue sky.  The trains flush in and flush out, getting all where they need to go and never a minute too late.  I watch as smoke billows from an exhaust vent on top of a rusting warehouse and it steams a moisture patch on the brick chimney next to it, long since dormant.
It's a normal spring day, pretty and cool, and I think of T.S. Eliot and his twisted vision of the so-called prosperous season; how the sun  melted and uncovered piles of mangled bodies decomposing like cow dung in the damp, muddy heaths all across Europe; how even without a world war, spring somehow brings me a sense of sadness, just inklings, of how another season has passed and we looked forward to the next, forgetting of the last.
However, it's hard to be sad in the sun and it's hard to be sad in the breeze, but when the rain comes and cries its eyes on the grey-lit Earth one of these April mornings, I'll revisit my thought and find a really sad one to share.