Poems by Peter Neil Carroll

Romance to Spring

by Peter Neil Carroll

From Canary Spring 2024

Peter lives in mid-center of the San Francisco Peninsula which brings in winds from the Pacific Ocean, a touch of fog in the morning, sunshine most dry afternoons.

March the Lion approaches Equinox,
the willow wearing heavy chartreuse,
my lemon tree, massacred by deer

all winter, pushes its shoots skyward;
morning rain dissolves in black soil
around the young rosemary—

these lines I know read like a romance
to spring, but in four years past
such ecstasy sat in quarantine,

awaiting the day of liberation while
we humans waited for plague to arrive
in a day or a week or never or forever,

wondering if the trees survived who would
pick the fruit or remember those bare times.

Two Minutes

by Peter Neil Carroll

From Canary Winter 2023-24

She married
on the twenty-second day of December,
pleased to begin at the birth
of the solar cycle
that extended light by two minutes
each day—one in the morning by her watch,
one in the evening. Each day
extended, each a little lighter and maybe
if the sun could be trusted
a little warmer. She knew
that was unlikely but why not
hope against doing nothing.
Once while standing at an open window
during a thunderstorm
lightning glanced off a brick wall
hit the spoon in her hand, saved
from any mark by its wood handle.
She had reason to fear darkness
of the short days.
Her marriage encouraged more hope.
She’d been born on an American holiday,
her immigrant parents unsure which one—
Lincoln’s birthday, Washington’s birthday—
but when she found her birth certificate
it showed the fourteenth day of the second month,
Valentine’s Day. No one forgot her birthday.
Every year I bought my mother
a heart-shaped box of chocolates.
Time passed: her sister died young.
Her husband died young. She continued—
—eighty, ninety—still driving a car,
shopping, winding her clocks. Days got shorter,
days got longer. Her two minutes
came or went each day. On a day of
weak sunlight, her body rounded
the solstice circle, December 21.