On an errand recently, just a few days before the beginning of spring, I spotted these croci (crocuses) sprouting up from turf at the base of a large maple tree. The flowers seemed to have won a valiant battle over roots, grass, and pieces of bark. They weren’t overwhelmingly beautiful, but I admired the courage it took to find and homestead such a precarious piece of turf no more than two feet from the street. In their honor I composed this poem:
No definitive pop
You emerged with a pfft
Those tinctured pastels
Gave Terra Firma the slip
As your Mother Earth
Awoke from her sleep
You hurried your trek
From half-frozen deep
No blaring trumpets
Nor strings aplenty
Warbled your birth
From winter’s eternity
Yet quiescent blooms
Stirred my eyes from their glaze
Awakened my passion
From slumberous malaise
*
Rocky James Curtiss 03/22/2018
jasorrocky 
Gorgeous things, croci (crocuses), as is your poem, Rocky. By the way, I’d long pronounced croci as “crock-eye”, imagining them as somehow a variant species of a crocodile with a peculiar glint in one eye (the left) for staring down its prey. But unsure, I went to one of those “how do you pronounce it” websites, and the audio-response sounded very much like “cross-eye”, which, of course, offered at least half support to my “crock-eye” theory. And then along came your poem, which put the kibosh on that.