Work of the Week

I am Filled with Love for Something

It’s spring again and the early rain is contending with hyacinths for my mood.

It’s clear from the smile I feel like confectioner’s sugar on my post-donut lips that I can love. 

I wouldn’t say love the world, because optimism can’t be that inclusive

unless we cover our eyes with daffodils and have mating cardinals perch on our earlobes. 

Gushing about the awakening earth makes sense from the safe distance of a page.

But this is a draft of feeling I’m not yet ready to specify or revise.

If I were AI, I could use as an example the pond newly thawed.

But even Thoreau had his reservations, as I have mine

for Easter brunch on this bright, crisp, ascendant day with its hymns and vigils.

I do love creation, but to take the myth at face value would ruin the mood.

From her window bed my white-muzzled dachsund is tracking a squirrel. 

Does she love it or just the idea that it is shaking its tail to satisfy her?

About George

George Guida is the author of ten books, including the novels The Uniform (Guernica Editions, 2024) and Posts from Suburbia (Encircle Publications, 2022); the poetry collections Zen of Pop (Long Sky Media, 2020), New York and Other Lovers, revised edition (Encircle, 2020), The Sleeping Gulf (Bordighera Press, 2016), Pugilistic (WordTech Editions, 2015), and Low Italian (Bordighera, 2007); and the essay collections Spectacles of Themselves: Essays in Italian American Literature and Popular Culture (Bordighera, 2016), and The Peasant and the Pen: Men, Enterprise and the Recovery of Culture in Italian American Narrative (Peter Lang, 2003). His poetry, fiction and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. He teaches writing and literature at New York City College of Technology, and coordinates the Finger Lakes Reading and Performance Series at his family’s cafe’, the MacFadden Coffee Company, in Dansville, New York.