Spring in the Meadow

He sits with the stillness of something that knows
the meadow is watching — the ryegrass, the rooks,
the red campion trembling where cold morning goes
to warm itself slowly in overlooked nooks.

His eye holds the field like a question unasked,
amber and ancient, alert to the hour —
the way a mind lingers on what it has grasped
and cannot quite name: the particular power

of being alive in a light that won't last.
Around him, the white petals loosen and fall.
The trees in the distance are bluish and vast.
He neither retreats from this world nor stands tall —

just breathes in the interim, quiet and brown,
while spring does its restless, indifferent work:
the flooding of colour, the letting things drown
in sweetness, the pull and the ache and the murk

of being awake in a world full of signs
one cannot quite read. He will bolt. He will go.
But now — only now — in the grass where light shines,
he stays with the not-knowing. Stays with the slow.