Orrin Schwab's poem begins with a warm spring day in a city. The sun is hot, the trees are blooming pink and yellow, and young people sit on campus lawns while music drifts out of rooms and cars. The speaker takes in all this with obvious pleasure, and the images are loose, bright and sensory, so the opening feels like a deep breath of sunny air.
Then the mood shifts. The third stanza turns to a world in turmoil, one that appears on screens as "perfect images" of faces marked by pain. The speaker doesn't look away from this, but the poem refuses to let it have the last word. "But even so," the final stanza begins, and the season wraps the city in "a circle of being," lifting air and sky into a "bright heaven." The feeling is not denial so much as stubborn gratitude: even if the world is tragic, the speaker finds that beauty and aliveness still break through, and the poem ends on that lift.