Why Does Spring Get All the Love?

A Poem by Janna Knittel

Photo by Fabrice Villard

Louise Glück wrote, It is spring!

We are going to die! because

birth is fatal. A crocus

bursts from dirt overnight,

then flops and dies. Why not

love winter, bearded old man

who doesn’t mean to be

ungentle? Muskrats and hares

grow thicker fur to jacket

themselves from his peppermint

breath. Iced-over lakes shield

frogs and turtles who sleep

until time to fatten and mate.

Birches and firs draw new horizons

on gray skies. And the freeze

helps maple sap run sweet.

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Janna Knittel is the author of Real Work (Nodin, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award in poetry, and the chapbook Fish & Wild Life (Finishing Line, 2018). Janna has also published poems in Blue Mountain Review, Conduit, Constellations, North Dakota Quarterly, Pleiades, The Trumpeter, and The Wild Word as well as the following anthologies: Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Anthology (Split Rock, 2018); The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition, 2023); and Broad Wings, Long Legs: A Rookery of Heron Poems (North Star, forthcoming 2023). Janna lives in Minnesota but “home” is still the Pacific Northwest.