Spring

 

What Spring Does

The lilac doesn't ask permission —
she simply arrives, heavy with herself,
and the bees come, and the light comes,
and even grief steps aside
to let her pass.

*Artwork created with a tutorial by Thera.  Poetry is ©Stacy Stephens

End of Spring

 

The End of Spring

She leaves without announcement, as she always does,

the last petal released like a small surrender,

green deepening into something more serious now,

the garden settling into the long work of summer

with no time left for beauty that asks nothing of us.

*Artwork created with a tutorial by Thera.  Poetry is ©Stacy Stephens

Beyond the Edge of the Garden

 

That Slant of Light

The garden holds its breath

in that particular hour —

not night, not morning yet,

but something bruised between.

The moon has not let go.

He never lets go easily,

that old negotiator of tides,

hanging pale and stubborn

in a sky already blushing

at what is coming.

And then the light arrives —

not all at once,

never all at once —

a slant of it, golden-thin,

sliding across the sleeping beds

like a hand laid gently

on a shoulder.

It finds the dew first.

It always finds the dew first.

Each drop a small world

suddenly lit from within,

as if they too had been waiting

for permission to be beautiful.

The hydrangeas stand still.

The dark earth gives off its breath.

Something that was shadow

becomes outline, becomes leaf, becomes

itself again —

the slow ceremony

of things returning to their names.

I have stood here before

in other Marches, other mournings,

watching this same negotiation

between the dark and the possible.

The moon argues. The light insists.

And the garden, wise and patient,

simply opens.

I am learning to do the same.

On Returning

 March, 2026

I have been away from this page for some months now. I did not mean to stay gone so long, but grief has a way of making time irrelevant — the holidays came and went like weather I watched through a window, present but not quite participating. January was its own country entirely. My father died on the thirty-first, at the cold end of the coldest month, and something in me understood this as completion in a way I am still turning over, the way you turn a stone in your palm to feel its weight.

I am not here today to grieve openly. That work happens in private, in its own rooms.

What I want to speak to is something I noticed while I was away — a quiet turning, the way a plant on a windowsill orients itself toward light without drama or announcement. My artwork has been shifting beneath me. The confessional pull, that old need to wound the page and call it honesty, has loosened its grip. I find myself drawn instead to the heron in still water. To the way early light diffuses through fog. To hope not as a performance but as a posture, a decision the body makes before the mind catches up.

I think of Sarton writing in her journals about the quality of a particular afternoon, how the light fell across her desk, what the garden was doing in early March. Not navel-gazing — something more outward than that, and yet profoundly interior. The self as witness to the world rather than as the wound at the center of it.

This is what my art wants now. This is what I am learning to give it.

I am still here. I am still Stacy, still nocturnal, still drawn to the moon's particular logic. But something has softened at the edges, opened. There is a tenderness toward living that I want to make visible in what I create — not as sentiment, but as intention. As discipline, even. To look at the wildflower in the cracked pavement and choose that as my subject. To let that be enough. To let that, in fact, be everything.

It is good to be back.

Checkout Was Hours Ago

 

We Thought We Were Going Somewhere

 

Time Doesn't Matter Here