I was thinking on opening with either some Whitman (a flowery, wordy Salut au Monde) or Neruda (something sparse but springlike).

Then it hit me on my walk to work. What a novel idea of spring we have here in New England. Wandering down the streets in my lined raincoat, wool hat, gloves, highwaters, face unprotected from the still cutting wind and icy spitting - I was thinking of April showers bringing May flowers as well as April ice storms killing early buds. This was a brutal winter. It's still holding on, but its grasp feels like it's loosening a bit. I'm hopeful. But I'm not giving up the winter mindset just yet:

The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens

Happy Spring, happy start of Poetry month, and happy April Fools Day.