Spring is close, readers. And this week’s poem, by Laura Bonazzoli, revels in its approach. This poem’s rich and luminous imagery, its scents, sounds and light, feel like gifts, as does its breathless forward momentum toward rebirth.

Bonazzoli is a freelance writer and editor and teaches English at The Watershed School in Camden. Her poetry has appeared in Connecticut River Review, Reed Magazine, Slant and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in “Balancing Act 2: An Anthology of Poetry by Fifty Maine Women” and “A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis.”

Even now

we begin again.

Perhaps dawn calls us

a breeze through an open window

fragrance of orchard and honey

the clacking of crows.

Perhaps as we rise

still webbed in dream

we dare again to anticipate

touch.

The morning understands.

Even now its ancient

worms monarchs crows

press on

toward their ineluctable bliss

its gnarled

apple trees

quake

with heedless and holy expectancy

of light

of warmth

of bee to brush their blossoms’ yearning

dust

into ovaries

into fruit again

seeds again

their dark embryos dreaming

of some beloved purpose.

— Laura Bonazzoli

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Even Now,” copyright © 2019 by Laura Bonazzoli. It appears by permission of the author.