Nature poetry – Jill Szoo Wilson

Spring does not arrive in ribbons.
It comes with a throat full of weather.

The sky lowers itself
until rooftops seem to hold it up.
Rain begins without ceremony—
a rehearsal for drowning
that never quite succeeds.

On the oak’s blackened spine
a squirrel emerges,
fur slicked to its quick, astonished body.
It pauses as though the world
has just been repainted mid-sentence.

Green—
not the polite green of greeting cards,
but the kind wrung from the earth
by pressure.

Grass leans forward, fluorescent with rumor.
Moss burns along the stones.
Even the bark darkens into something
nearly blue.

The squirrel descends headfirst,
a punctuation mark with claws,
tail arched like a question
the storm declines to answer.

Water pearls along its whiskers.
It blinks, and the yard rearranges itself.
Every leaf appears newly sworn in.
Every puddle holds a duplicate sky
shivering with revision.

Somewhere thunder practices authority.
The squirrel does not applaud.

It runs—
a brief streak of umber against electric green—
then stops again,
as if suspecting
that sight itself has molted.

What has changed?
The tree remains a tree.
The fence, a fence.
Yet color has stepped forward
and declared independence.

The storm insists.
The earth complies.

And the squirrel,
small curator of the soaked morning,
presses its paws into the vivid grass
as though testing
whether the brightness
will stain.

A robin lands on the arm of the garden chair
as if the universe were not built to frighten her.
She tilts her head. The world tilts with it.

No anthem announces her.
No speech.
No medal.
Only the wind, unbuttoned at the collar,
pretending not to notice.

She steps once, twice—
a feathered stride across the iron rung,
making a path of what is there.
The waking yard yawns and watches,
a mini tightrope walker—
eight out of ten from the pine tree branches.

She pecks at a crumb
left over from someone’s careless breakfast—
(is that my blueberry with a bit of bagel?)
it is hardly a feast.
Yet she claims it with the authority
of a creature who never learned to doubt her place.

A distant car door slams.
The robin pauses.
I can see her thinking
the way a tiny body thinks—
all heartbeat and decision.

Then she stays.

This is how courage works:
not with battle cries,
but with the quiet agreement
to remain exactly where fear expected you to flee.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

Tag: Nature poetry

Poem: Concerto for Springtime and Squirrel

Poem: Eight Out of Ten