The Heart's Cosmogony: A Spring Poem

Spring returns.

God, that's no news.
Old mudball Earth,
Since first flung out among the stars,
Has spun and arced
Predictably.
It's all astronomy and gravity:
The angle that the axis tilts,
Its angle to the solar plane,
And Earth's eternal orbiting.
No secrets here.
It's just about as dry
As junior high school
General Science,
As drab as Algebra.

But Spring returns,
To everyone's surprise;
And every puddle,
Bud-tipped branch,
And nesting wren
Is dressed with Meaning,
Tricked out with words,
And poetry -- it never fails! --
Comes swirling round the globe,
And every vernal impulse
Finds a poet and a tongue
To swell the grand polyphony,
The countless psalms and madrigals
Proclaiming Spring's return.

The heart's cosmogony --
This also is no news --
Has its own geometry:
The angle of its plane of yearning
To the tilted axis of surprise.

-- Warren F. O'Rourke, 1981