April is the Cruelest Month

"In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us."
---Czeslaw Milosz, Ars Poetica

It is said that gardening is an exercise in faith. We plant seed, water, weed, on the belief that a miracle will happen. And when it does, we experience the elation of life both externally with having aided the seeds' growth, and internally when we realize that there are things greater than we are. As the seed grows toward the sun, we, too, grow.

Whitman writes:


Now I am terrified at the Earth! it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of
diseas’d
corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

--Excerpt from This Compost by Walt Whitman

April is indeed a cruel time. It offers so much hope that will be dashed by October. But it is a kind month too, offering fruitfulness from last year's "fetors".