The Threshold

The frost retreats like a held breath, soil darkening beneath its retreat, and still the air hesitates— neither winter's clean silence nor spring's insistent greening.

The crocuses push through in their small defiance, purple and yellow certainties while the trees remain skeletal, their branches catching weak light.

I stand in the garden's grammar, learning to read the tense between what was and what wants to be, my breath a small cloud meeting the world's slow thaw.

The earth shifts imperceptibly, a settling, a stirring— everything waits in the translation, everything knows the secret of how to become.