It almost feels as if I haven't had any real time off since we went to Cape Cod last summer for vacation. Since then, there has been the campaign, my mother's death, storms, the Health Leaders Fellowship, and plenty of things to deal with at work. Yes, there was Christmas, like Dar Williams sings, "a long red glare shot up like a warning". I worked on Middnight on Main for New Years Eve. At least I got to see Dar that evening. Since then, I've take a few days off here and there, to go to a funeral or to help clean out my mother's house, but that's been about it.

So, here we are as Lent leads into Holy Week. The vernal equinox has come, and hopefully we will soon be done with snow until next winter. At church, we have a pick-up choir, often doing fairly simple pieces so anyone can easily join in. But, for Good Friday, we are singing part of Heinrich Schutz's St. Matthew Passion. It is probably the most challenging piece I've sung since college and for the group of singers gathered, I'm probably the least accomplished. It is a stretch, but it feels good. The section we're singing fits well with Good Friday, as well as my Lenten contemplations.

So as I sing Schutz, I ponder poetry. The start of spring brings several poems to mind:
"Nature's first green is gold", Frost wrote and notes it cannot stay. Wordsworth talks about "a host, of golden daffodils". He goes talk about thinking about these daffodils when on his couch he lies "In vacant or in pensive mood."

Yeats "will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree". There, he will "live alone in the bee-loud glade". Yet for me, one of the first poems that caught my attention over two decades ago was Sea Fever by John Masefield. "I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky…"

I remember reading this poem in fifth grade and deeply feeling that sea fever, that longing to return to a peaceful simpler time; a time simpler than all the trials and turmoil of fifth grade. Tomorrow, before the crack of dawn, I shall head out to The Cape, "if it's fine tomorrow". My thoughts turn to Virginia Woolf's James Ramsay as he thinks about heading "To The Lighthouse". "These words conveyed an extraordinary joy".

My mind drifts to H.D., to her Sea Rose, caught in the drift, and her pointed pines of the sea. But I am tired and my mind is drifting. If I want to go to the lighthouse, or make it out to the Cape in good time, I'll "have to be up with the lark". This time, Virginia's Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway comes to mind, "What a lark! What a plunge!"