Poem: “We Wait for Spring” By John Greenleaf Whittier

‘Tis the noon of springtime, yet never a bird
in the wind-shaken elm or the maple is heard;
for green meadow grasses, wide levels of snow,
and blowing of drifts where the crocus should blow.

Where windflower and violet, amber and white,
on south-sloping brooksides should smile in the light
o’er the cold winter beds of their late-waking roots,
the frosty flake eddys, the ice crystal shoots.

And longing for light under wind-driven heaps,
round the boles of the pinewood, the ground laurel creeps,
unkissed of the sunshine, unbaptized of showers,
with buds scarcely swelled, which should burst into flowers!

We wait for thy coming, sweet wind of the south,
for the touch of thy light wings, the kiss of thy mouth,
for the yearly evangel thou bearest from God –
resurrection and life to the graves of the sod!