Frogs Came Before Locusts

 

As winter lingers past its silver shimmer, dimmed, gray
clouds low and heavy with unready snow, why not assess
the calendar’s limp pages, count the weeks. This is the way
I see that spring, crouched under frozen earth and ice, is less

 

distant after all. Seed catalogues clutter the kitchen table,
bright covers promoting the newest purple beans, salad greens,
all the promises that follow digging, setting seeds. I’ll be able
to double-dig the soil, once it thaws. Eight weeks to Passover means

 

it’s time to plan, calculate. Rain’s due. Pharaoh’s plagues came
with saturated spring, rejection rising from the flooded plain:

 

frogs, bugs, clattering locusts. Darkness and death, weeping—
bad things happen when you harden your heart. At age five
my grandson would have gathered them into his pail, keeping
the fattest, slickest frogs, naming them. Kissing their lips. Alive.