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.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2026
Jill Szoo Wilson 