This year the return of Spring
hurts: it’s too full of light, too scented
with jasmine and daphne,
too loud with ecstatic birds in the morning
mothers and babies, starting over .
Spring this year is too warm
and close to the impossibly blue
melting icecaps.
It’s marking time, mocking
what we’ve lost, four months now since
November, and we’re only older
and closer to another birthday.
We should be off
on adventures, laying on beaches,
taking advantage of our empty nest’s freedom.
We should be celebrating,
close to retirement.
How strange and disconcerting
this stopping in our life
before we’re ready
this stopping of work, when after all, losing a job is not as bad
as a life, a marriage, or the planet.
Still, it’s what I fear most.
Haunted by this image
not just losing a job, but not being able to find another,
and never working again.
Or another image: having to keep working
on and on, when I am too old and tired.
Either way, as the latest issue of The Economist puts it
in America which has “one of the lowest social safety nets
in the rich world, " this spring of 2009
leads me back to that job crisis
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