This Spring is Not the Same

This poem isn’t about flowers in bloom; it’s about what it means to live past your golden hour, to watch the world move on from something that once mattered deeply, and to still carry it — unspoken but undiminished.

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I have watched them bloom again,

those daffodils that rise each spring as if nothing has changed,

their yellow throats bright against skies that remember too much,

and though the breeze carries the scent of beginning,

it also whispers the names of what was lost in the waiting.

They are not foolish, those flowers.

They tilt their heads as if listening for something they once led,

a parade of gold in the time before the frost came early

and the soil forgot the warmth of true celebration.

There was a season —

a golden age, they might call it,

when our hands were full of sunlight,

when the fields rang with laughter that didn’t crack at the edges,

when yellow meant more than hope,

it meant arrival.

Now they return each year like sentinels in soft skirts,

standing proudly though fewer, though wind-worn,

and I nod to them from behind the curtain,

because I remember too —

and there is a melancholy pride in being one who still recalls

the rhythm of victory,

the cost of brightness,

and how silence can sometimes honour what singing cannot.