“…Spring will take the bow….”

With respects to Richard Shindell, an international treasure home grown in America.

In an early album, the brilliant singer/songwriter Richard Shindell, a Long Island boy who now lives in Buenos Aires, penned the following lyrics, a paean to one of the seasons, to wit, Spring:

The day will begin like any other
Another sunrise in the east
It will reach across and touch you like a lover
It will tease you from a dream

And opening your eyes you will surrender
To the light that fills the room
And the hope that you have carried since September
You will offer up to June

Maybe will be certain
You can take it as a vow
Winters just the curtain
Spring will take the bow

I have listened to this beautiful song many, many times, when dreary winter has chilled my bones — as much as one can be chilled in Southern California. I always heard it as a lovely melody and an encouraging thought/emotion: hang in there, Spring is On the Way.

But today, following another murder by ICE/Boarder Agents, I hear it with new ears. It now displays itself as a prayer for hope, and patience, and forbearance, and, yes, resistance.

It is a song that tells me, and “you can take it as a vow,” that this awful Trump winter of our fascist discontent cannot last forever. A Democratic Spring is on the Way. The murders of the ICE/Boarder Agents will be adjudicated. The pilfering of billions by Trump and his foul offspring will be addressed. The assaults on the judiciary, the terrorization of immigrants, the Nazi-esque brutality of his disgusting Storm Trooper and their manufactured inhumanity will all be undone in the Spring.

And that Spring has, ironically, already begun in frozen Minnesota, where protestors are out in sub-zero weather to address the onslaught of the Brown Shirts, those cowardly Proud Boys disguised as Law Enforcement. There, the frost has already seen an attitudinal thaw as elderly couples patrol with whistles and cameras alongside outraged young people, and middle class parents escort their children and the children of others to school, and CEO (kudos to 3M, e.g.) speak out to defend their community from the Hitlerian thugs propounded by Trump and Noem and Bondi and Patel and Bovino.

And when, in the words of Mr. Shindell, “Spring will take the bow,” be assured these rejects from humanity will face the thaw in courtrooms, both criminal and civil, and in political actions at every level.

“Spring Will Take the Bow….”