Poetry Sunday: Spring Blossom

Today's service at our church was about poetry. So, for the first time in many years I stood before a room full of people and nervously read the following poem that I wrote way back when. The things that can cause anxiety never really cease however our response to them can. That's what I think prompted me to write this.

Spring Blossom
by Scott Walldren

After a while I will shed my skin
and thank the powers for another time to be.
Another time to live and grow, like a spring blossom.

Brought into being by such a turbulent start,
thunder, lightning, rain giving life.
The great fear.

Where does it all end and I begin?

And then there becomes that particular quiet,
the distant final rattle of thunder over the horizon
and the haze begins to clear.

I will now finally be able to meet the sun.
Only then can I say that "I am" again.

But sometimes old snakeskin dreams lay all around me
and I choke on the dander of a different day.
Great fear returns.

My reaching heart hides where it thinks it can be safe.

No, it will not weather a new thunderhead.
A frightened child, a blossom trying to go back to seed,
to a time where it did not know of " storms".

And then I realize that "I am."
That I came from this turbulence.
This is what I have come from and where I am going again.

The mind can see beyond these storms,
beyond the outrageous fortune, beyond the concepts of defeat and death--
no longer as a seed, but as a spring blossom.