April

Virna Sheard's 'April' is a tender, luminous celebration of spring's arrival, captured in verse that shimmers with the particular joy of watching the world wake from winter's sleep. The poem moves through the landscape as if personally greeting each sign of renewal: the soft warmth returning to the air, the earth turning green, the songs of birds reintroducing themselves after months of silence. Sheard writes with the kind of attention that makes the reader suddenly see what they might have walked past unobserved. There is no grand declaration here, only the quiet revelation that beauty has returned, as it does, as it always will. This is a poem for anyone who has ever stood outside in early spring and felt the simple, profound relief of the world beginning again.