Spring, you flirt

You briefly appear

Boasting of your unparalleled beauty and

Tantalising us with your bluebells, daisies and daffodils.

They should call you Cassiopeia,

Your beauty hits like bullets

And blinds the most courageous among us

Still, the robins flit past with their immortality and enviable durability

And the chill persists

Perhaps not as magnificent as you would have yourself believe.

You stand accused of being summer dressed to the nines,

In disguise,

A tease,

Sucking out twisted joy in our annual suffering

you pay us shallow cliche compliments

A chocolate egg here, a butterfly there

Solidifying the intricate silk patterns of your web

Give me that heat.

Oh the heat we adore to bark at and loathe

And makes us scramble for shade like a dog to meat

Until your cousin autumn arrives with her

Frosted fingertips

That lace our beaches with breeze

And our children with the immense fear of academia

But she can’t cover our optimism with her ice tinted blankets

The sky will still light up with frightening abstract neon shapes

Whilst the soil below becomes decorated with masses of masked children

Appearing to mock the devil

And then again, up in the sky

She glows with a garish scarlet cannonball

suspected of bearing gifts

And then suddenly…

A subdued rosy warmth brushes the back of my neck

Spring, you have come again and my elation is unmatched

The verse of Venus