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I Am Still Waiting for Green Mornings
by Carol A. Stephen

I woke this morning to snow on the dwarf
spruce, small dustings on its branches, lovely
come December, but it’s April now.

Last summer was too hot for green, while autumn
was a bold blur of red, yellow, orange, until lockdown
washed all colour from the world.

I am still waiting for those green mornings, for unpremeditated
rapture, for Perpetual Wonder, and for animals to fall like rain
in a painted tangle of green in Mikhail Vrubel’s Morning.

But now, everyone runs in place; I run in circles, and we’re all
still waiting for the final “all-clear.” In the garden, lilacs are budding,
robins have returned, and along the Riverwalk, forest babies wait

for their next meal. White-tailed deer forage under the snow.
Herons, otters and mink dive in the river for fish. The ospreys are back
to their nest above the ball diamond on 9th line. And all of us, waiting.

PAINTING: Morning by Mikhail Vrubel (1897).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wanted to link back in some way to my poem from the I AM WAITING Series (Dec. 2014-January 2015), “Waiting for Green Mornings,” which was a found poem from Ferlinghetti’s “I Am Waiting.” I also wanted to acknowledge the waiting we all have been doing as we continue to wait out the pandemic. And yet, I couldn’t help but see that the natural world goes on, just as it always has. Spring has arrived, despite the snow this morning, and the local woods are full of animals, going on as usual.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carol A. Stephen poetry appears in Poetry Is Dead, June 2017, and numerous print publications, including Wintergreen Studios chapbooks, Sound Me When I’m Done, and Teasing the Tongue. Online poems appear at Silver Birch Press, Topology Magazine, The Light Ekphrastic, and With Painted Words. Carol won Third prize in the CAA National Capital Writing Contest, and was featured in Tree’s Hot Ottawa Voices. She served on the board for Canadian Authors Association-NCR and co-directed Ottawa’s Tree Reading Series. Carol has five chapbooks, two released in 2018: Unhook, catkin press, Carleton Place, and Lost Silence of the Small, Local Gems Press, Long Island, New York  In 2019, Winning the Lottery, Surviving Clostridium Difficile was published by Crowe Creations.ca. Currently, she is working on the manuscript for her first full-length poetry collection.