Waiting for Spring

[71degrees]

Hi 71 degrees,
I love watching for spring and your poem delivers plenty of images, but I did find there were a couple issues that made me pause in the read.
Some comments below.

Waiting for Spring

Across the snow marshes This is nice, but the idea of snow marshes keeps tripping me up. Snowy marshes / snow clad marshes /snow encrusted marshes...but a marsh is a wet habitation and snow marshes just sends me off thinking about what a snow marsh would be. Sorry i know this is pedantic but this is a problem for me.
behind my home, soft clouds
gray and fuzzy, blue illusions I share some of the previous comments about fuzzy. It seems the wrong image - too child like and weak. (Might as well described them as fluffy ).
structure the edges as a lone hawk
dips and circles its mating dance. Hmm a lone hawk in a mating dance...so he's just flying around by himself then? Think this image might need a bit of sorting out. It is such a strong mental image if anyone has ever watched the mating dance of any of the hawks and other birds that put a display on...but the stronger image is when two birds lock together in a display flight. We have the raven just on the warm up act above the farm and also the buzzards. Your lines feel a bit insiped here. But I love that you have included the description.

Ah, this slow pace system
of systems, whirling and turning Yep get the image and the thought but the actual impact of the lines feels like a filler and is not saying much to me beyond what I have already got from the title and the descriptions of spring in the first stanza
northern expectations like March kites—
it’s about all that rational humans You completly lost my interest in this line and the next. I'm wanting to feast on images of winter / spring transition. This just felt like an ugly interuption and did not work for me. Other's might feel / read differently. You had an image when you wrote this and this obviously spoke to you. Just offering my view as a reader - These lines did not do anything to enhance my read.
can stand as we wait patiently
for grasshopper men to drive through I got an image of a birds eye view of looking down on the grass fields and the effect of distance on the objects - so I liked grasshopper men / warm blades.
the warm blades of summer Much of this stanza left me cold, although it carries plenty of meaning.

The sun sets stronger, reining
over a weakening, bleak wind;
geese are reappearing in sky V’s; this line feels clunky - perhaps v's of geese are reappearing.
first it was snowing, and now it’s not—
yet, I can’t find the moment it stopped I like these two lines and feel that this stanza was the strongest.

Hope these comments might be of help. Overall i liked the poem.
All the best AJ

Much to discern here. You have no idea how much this kind of critique helps me. Appreciate it. 100% negative critiques are pointless and a complete waste of time for both parties.

One point: Hawks "dance" solo to attract mates. They are not ravens. The image is on purpose to match the narrator's sense of being alone during this slow change (see my above comments to Jeremy). I'm encouraged by your sense of "coldness"....That's what I want. We are almost in a state of weather purgatory here as we wait for winter to release its grip. Again, my thanks for both your time and your interest in writing.

---

so grashopper men is a play on army men?

Sort of. It may be colloquial....often times the hordes of grasshoppers around here are referred to as an "army"....also, I played w/the green army men a lot when I was a kid. Maybe the image just stuck w/me.