“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked. “There isn’t any,” said the March Hare. “Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily. “It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare.—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland March itself arrives as a welcome but not always civil guest, alternately bringing cold, sun, wind, rain, warm temperatures, offering the hope of  and then disappointing with another blast of winter. T.S. Eliot famously said “April is the cruelest month,” but March is surely the most mercurial. In that spirit, a few poems for the month of March. Emily Dickinson welcomes the month that trails winter but hints of Spring: “Dear March—Come in— How glad I am— I hoped for you before— Put down your Hat— You must have walked— How out of Breath you are— Dear March, how are you, and the Rest— Did you leave Nature well— Oh March, Come right upstairs with me— I have so much to tell—” https://poets.org/poem/dear-march-come-1320 For A.E. Housman, March means the return of Spring and the renewal of life: “So braver notes the storm-cock sings To start the rusted wheel of things, And brutes in field and brutes in pen Leap that the world goes round again./ The boys are up the woods with day To fetch the daffodils away, And home at noonday from the hills They bring no dearth of daffodils.// In farm and field through all the shire They eye beholds the heart’s desire; Ah, let not only mine be vain, For lovers should be loved again.” https://poets.org/poem/shropshire-lad-x Similarly, William Wordsworth rhapsodizes the coming of Spring in a poem to his sister: “It is the first mild day of March: Each minute sweeter than before The redbreast sings from the tall larch That stands beside our door.// There is a blessing in the air, Which seems a sense of joy to yield To the bare trees, and mountains bare, And grass in the green field.” https://www.excellence-in-literature.com/march-poems/ Another poem about the promise of renewal from William Carlos Williams: “Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed Spring approaches—/ They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind—/ Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf One by one objects are defined— It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf/ But now the stark dignity of entrance—Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken” https://poets.org/poem/Spring-and-all-road-contagious-hospital Thomas Hardy remembers a great love and its loss in March: “O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free — The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me./ The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say, As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day./ A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain, And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain, And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main./ — Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky, And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh, And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?” https://allpoetry.com/Beeny-Cliff-_March-1870---March-1913_ I was recently in Kansas City for the annual conference of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). One afternoon, I took a break and a walk near the convention center. I turned a corner and was hit with a blast of wind so strong it blew off my sunglasses and wrapped my lanyard around my neck. I was disconcerted at first, but then I felt a strange exhilaration. I realized that I was experiencing the wind that comes sweeping down the plains and I was transported for a moment back to my prairie childhood when the winds of March brought Spring in their wake. Hence these poems.