This poem was excerpted from Mischa Willett’s book, The Elegy Beta.
Come crack the frozen
branch-ends that’ve had you so long
penned up as in winter-trap,
snow-drift, tree-sap.
Have the whole Earth heave
and scream at your verdant birth;
bring in your train the bright green
lips of leaves, the lengthening day,
the suggestion of sex, a mess;
wreck the hard and frostbitten ground
with your trillion shoots; break through,
crown, come in like a tooth
into a world sore, into the ache;
come save the stupid, drooped
stems of our hearts before they wilt;
by the Earth’s cataclysmic tilt,
Primavera, evergreen hope,
get here.