blossoms begin

I've been doing a lot of spring things this week while the weather has been good, and today I went to the New York Botanical Gardens with a friend to see the daffodils and cherry blossoms. We also went to the orchid show, which wasn't part of the original plan (the original plan was mainly to go stare at Daffodil Hill and then get lunch at the cafe), but was a great addition. This is not a poem about cherry blossoms or daffodils or orchids, but I think it's thematically appropriate, and flowering trees are very important. (If you want daffodils, there's always Wordsworth.)

One evening in winter
when nothing has been enough,
when the days are too short,

the nights too long
and cheerless, the secret
and docile buds of the apple

blossoms begin their quick
ascent to light. Night
after interminable night

the sugars pucker and swell
into green slips, green
silks. And just as you find

yourself at the end
of winter’s long, cold
rope, the blossoms open

like pink thimbles
and that black dollop
of shine called

bumblebee stumbles in.

—Susan Kelly-DeWitt, "Apple Blossoms," from To a Small Moth (Poet's Corner Press, 2001).