Spring rarely arrives in a poem as a gentle lady in a flowered dress. In Michael John Pickering's «Equinox 1962» it arrives as a shove. Everything in these twelve lines is pressed, flicked, kicked or nudged. The word "equinox" suggests a balance, day and night in equal measure, but the poem shows the moment tipping over into a surge of energy that runs through plants, air and children alike.
The first line sets the tone: "Wind tamps the mint green ground." To tamp is to pack something down firmly, as a gardener does with soil around a new plant, so the wind becomes a workman and the grass looks freshly minted. Then comes "Breeding bud / stripes the pinafored thorn." The line break lets "bud" hang for a moment before its verb arrives. The thorn bush is dressed in a pinafore, which is a neat clash of prickliness and childish innocence. "Stripes" suggests streaks of new green on dark branches. The pinafore also quietly prepares us for the schoolboys who turn up later.
The second stanza loosens the grip on realism. Seed is "spattered", as if flicked from a brush, and then compared to "tiny porcupine quills", a phrase that makes sprouting feel sharp and a little defensive. After that the poem pivots to "a mounting kick / that frets and fizzes the air". The kick has no clear owner. It could be growth, or a ball being struck, and the poem lets both readings stand. "Frets and fizzes" buzzes in the mouth, and "frets" makes the air itself seem restless. The stanza ends on an indented, drifting line, "at two jumps height". The measurement is a child's, not a ruler's, and the line sits apart on the page as if it has been kicked upward.
In the last stanza the children arrive. "Schoolboys no longer dribble down / small paths their old brown moon." Judging by the imagery, the old brown moon is a battered football, and calling it a moon ties this muddy object back to the astronomy of the title. "No longer" tells us the season has changed the game. "Loud sticks and stubs fly up" seems to point to bats and stumps, though the poem never names cricket. What matters is the direction of travel. The ball once went "down" the paths, but now things "fly up". The wind pushes the ground down in the opening line, and after that nearly everything rises: the quills, the kick, the jumps, the sticks.
The final line is the strangest and the best: "Spring flowers chivvy the stone's loin." The word "spring" is held back until this point, so the season is named only once everything has already shown it. "Chivvy" is what you do to a dawdler, nagging and hurrying them along, so the flowers become bossy little creatures and the stone the sluggish one. "Loin" gives the stone a body, a flank to be prodded, and carries a faint hint of fertility. The image is comic, but it is also a little charged.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The stanzas run to three, five and four lines, and the lengths and indents are uneven, as if the poem were scattered like its seed. Sound does the binding instead. Hard consonants snap through "tamps", "kick", "quills", "sticks" and "stubs", while "frets and fizzes" hisses between them. Almost every sentence is driven by a physical, slightly domestic verb: tamps, stripes, frets, fizzes, chivvy. No "I" appears and no observer comments. The poem reports and trusts the images.
That restraint is much of its appeal. The title fixes a precise moment, like a date on the back of a photograph, and the poem fills that moment with small, vivid facts. It treats a budding thorn and a game of boys with sticks as parts of the same pulse, without sentimentality or explanation. It also shows how much work verbs can do. In twelve lines the season is not described so much as felt, pressing from below and kicking from above.