Roots & Wings - . by Wendy Brown-baez

(Winner of the Goodreads Poetry Contest, February 2009)


It is a spring-time ritual. To feel
the stretch, tiny crackle of bones

hollow for expected flight. It is
a way to shed winter, the beary

coat of hunger and sleep. It is
lifting a face to sun, to shiver

with velvet tips of green, the
tingle of sap as it begins to sing

its way up from the bulb. It is the
expansion out deep into earth

wet from snow-melt, delirious
with nutrients, learning green.

It is ancient as the first day of creation,
new as the hatching of love in the

compost. It is a fever as it unfolds
in the pulsing of blood, a lift to the sky.

It comes to earn our seeded trust,
it brings us back to kneel and sing.