The poem opens with a grim either/or: if the land isn't burning, it's drowning. Disaster keeps swapping places, and there's no safe option. Even the water carries "a bitter aftertaste," as if something has already gone wrong with it.
Then the focus shifts to people. Unemployed men, worn down by winter and hunger, take work from the state for $1.25 an hour. The pay is tiny, and the phrase "hiring out" makes them sound desperate, almost for sale. The final lines widen the view to everyone else in the countryside, "careless / with matches & overloaded / dams." The danger isn't just bad luck, then. Human neglect helps cause it.
The speaker doesn't announce anger, but it shows in the flat, clipped delivery. The mood is tense and uneasy, with a sense that hardship and disaster are both close and that the people with the least are the ones left to cope. The title's "Spring" feels ironic, since nothing here is renewing.