Spring Again
- Green Iowa AmeriCorps
- Apr 18
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Nick Blocha
Fire,
Deep orange that wants to burn darker into red in its depth and yellow at its flickering tips. Dancing and jumping in the air, ever reaching upwards, never able to grasp with a firm grip.
How quick the tan burns to black and soot.
That is the essence of fire. To transform.
Transform this prairie, these grasses and shrubs, down to the Earth and up to the sky,
Make way, make way, for a new brood is breeding beneath in the soft, cracking soil trying so hard to hold what rain will fall.
Buds of green come the grass, turfed for our bare feet that will be shed in Spring and Summer,
as the brohm dies and rests while the bonnets and cones push upwards to the sun’s warming source.
Grow little cells, grow.
Multiply and be born over again and again until a ripe, strong stalk stands tall and proud on the hillside, in the ditch and valley. Under sun and shade,
Grow little cells, grow.
Winter’s chill remains on sister wind’s rough embrace. How she plays with your hair, tugs at your sleeves and the loose fabrics she can reach. Clouds and smoke rise from the horizon and beyond.
In the energy of fire we bring forth the songs of the cardinals, blue jays, the singers of Spring. In the lick and lap of flame, roaring hot on one’s sun-speckled skin, away goes the bite of Winter, thawed into blooming arms.
And the water too has thawed from Winter’s frozen hold, again pushed and splashed by the air’s deep song, intertwined with its own.
Sirens of the wind and water call to us, serenaded into life renewed again. In these elements of the Earth we find more still, even if they themselves are not.
Such sacred rites are these. The rites of Spring come again.
About The Author
Nick Blocha is serving as a Land and Water Steward via Green Iowa AmeriCorps at the Iowa Lakeside Labs (ILL) in Milford, Iowa. Sister lab to the state hygienists in Iowa City, ILL analyzes water samples from around the state, hosts researchers and students, artists and writers, and aids in a number of environmental and community efforts with a multitude of partnering organizations and government agencies.
With a background in the arts and storytelling, and as a long-time environmental enthusiast, Nick grew up as a barefoot hippie in the woods of North Carolina and Atlanta, and values the service they can provide and assist with via the GIA program. Nick seeks to focus on the spaces where human society and nature intersect and coexist in harmony.