March Night

The night is soft, the still air silent and cool, the clouds concealing the stars. Well-leafed, the oaks now make my corner of the forest smaller, filling gaps between the slim trunks of the spare-branched pines, as though insisting that I retire into their glade. Even by night, their airy mass embraces the street and makes of sky a roof. Distances retreat from thin leaves which catch night's shadows and weave them into a solid cloak of darkness. Drifting mists grow dense and pass into pattering rain, return to mist, vanish and return. All night, the water feeds the growing leaves of sheltering spring.

Also

I'm supposed to pass this on:

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

--Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

Clearing

Clouds dissipate like the memory of dreams in the waking sky of afternoon. Unveiled sun drenches damp trees with light. The new oak leaves glow pale green against widening blue brushed with lingering strands of white. As always after rain, the sourgrass holds bright beads of water longer than other plants, and its dark green clumps sparkle with captured sunbeams and the passing day's reflection. The first lilies have bloomed, and are like creamy fragments of sunlit cloud snagged on green stalks. Several camellia blossoms have fallen intact to the ground, and lie there like reflections of those which droop among the overhanging leaves, soon to join them. Briefly do the flowers bloom before they fall among the gnarled roots of the trees which tower above them. The enduring change of seasons feeds the slow change of decades and centuries. When the trees have gone, the seasons will remain and bring the transient efflorescence of spring afternoons, ages on end.