Hillary Clinton: The Year in Review/Installment IV/April 2009

April, you're the Easter Bunny when you smile! (Neil Sedaka)

April inspires songwriters like Neil Sedaka, and poets.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
-T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Spring

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Well, okay, it seems the poets I like are were inspired to rather gloomy views of Spring rooted in consciousness of mortality, and I guess we can all admit that when the magic of Spring begins there is an underlying sadness tied to the temporal nature of what unfolds around us. Most of us, though, spend more time appreciating the emerging sprouts of green and pastel buds than ruminating over the fleeting character of the show and its darker implications.

And so it was, last April, as the snows receded and the crocuses and hyacinths emerged from the earth, that Hillary Rodham Clinton began to emerge as the lovely Hillary Clinton Tulip (named for her) that would, as she famously said, "bloom where she was planted." We were transfixed by the spectacle!



She was very busy in April, and swept into Europe like an April shower, charming one and all. She visited the Middle East and made a surprise trip to Iraq. We began to see the Hillary who was soon to earn the title (apparently an official tag on some blogs): Secretary of Awesome, and that she is!

Fortunately, it appears I was blogging somewhat more responsibly at this point. This is one of my very favorite pictures ever, and it was taken last April, of Hillary arriving in Germany and being greeted by Chancellor Angela Merkel.



And here are the archives from this blog for April 2009.