Surprise

The poetry of surprise speaks in the vivid springtime language of bulbs. A daffodil-sudden assault. We believe in the sure ground of the familiar, forgetting it is rigged with trapdoors that drop us slickly into the fertile depths of wonder. The head is confused but the heart knows enough to skip a beat and the breath to catch, when the wild beauty of hummingbirds darts into the frame of a dusk window, when red umbrellas flip inside out in the rain. When renegade moments break loose from the predictable march of calendar time to color our lives unexpected and real.