Spring is in the Air

Here comes the Spring!

With a zang and a zing!

There are flowers everywhere

and the trees are full of budding leaves

Lights on the Vltava

which a week ago were bare

People are wearing fewer clothes

it makes me want to sing

Life, sweet life, is bursting forth

there’s a reason they call it Spring

I just got home from a poetry reading and that little jingle came to me on the way home.  It works like that sometimes.  Writing is a bit like speaking.  Yeah, it’s not in real time, exactly, so you can think about things a bit and try to get the words just right and you can even edit them after you get them down on the page but, still, there is inevitably a “shoulda said” factor.

The poetry reading was not bad.  There was the usual mix of two or three readers I quite enjoyed and a whole bunch who I didn’t really understand.  I’m kind of shallow that way.  If it doesn’t rhyme, have a tight meter, or a really simple, straightforward idea expressed in simple words, I tend to tune out.  One girl read a poem about Rachel and Leah talking in the afterlife and lamenting that they weren’t born in modern times.  I thought that was clever.

But it isn’t the poetry reading I want to talk about, really.  It took place in the Anglo-American University Library, right next to Malostranka.  It’s a neighborhood I don’t get to often enough.  Like so many people who’ve lived here long enough that the touristy feel has worn off, I seldom make it across the river at all and when I do, it’s usually underground.

But it was a lovely evening, still warm although dark, and the bridge was right there, so I decided to walk from Malostranka back to Mustek before getting on the Metro.  There were lights on the river, the classical music crowd was just coming out of the Rudolfinum, crowds of people were milling through old town, I overheard the gangs of tourists making the comments that tourists make, in one restaurant a couple was dancing in the aisle, an ice cream shop was doing a roaring business.

It was just a lovely walk on a beautiful spring evening, and a reminder of why I decided to live in this city in the first place.