— Dear April, national poetry month, are you the cruelest month? The first line of “The Waste Land” says so, and poet T.S. Eliot wrote it 100 years ago, 1922.

So, 2022, let’s look at you.

Spring snow after joyful opening days at baseball parks celebrating Dodger great Jackie Robinson isn’t a good sign. Gardens are thrown off the seasons after a long winter.

But the worst of it is raging many thousands of miles away, in a conflict that burst into the open. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ruthless near-conquest of eastern Ukraine, the Donbas, is on. That region may soon fall.

At the rare convergence of Easter, Passover and Ramadan this April, some people prayed that peace would break out in Russia’s war on Ukraine. One was Pope Francis, who pleaded for an Easter truce.

“We have seen all too much blood, too much violence,” Francis declared, noting the suffering in several shattered cities.

Rome fell on deaf ears.

When the war is over, it will take years to pick up the pieces, no matter which side wins. Ukraine’s civilian casualties are mounting, each life irreplaceable. That toll will be on the world’s conscience for much time to come.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s stirring moments of bravery and unlikely glory — missiles sinking a Russian warship — may make him a tragic hero in the end.

Beautiful and bittersweet, April won’t tell yet.

Meanwhile, we Americans endure the hardship of higher gas prices as we fill up our SUV tanks. Pollsters predict that inflation will be the bane of President Joe Biden’s existence in a November blowout in the midterm elections.

With a slight Democratic majority in both chambers, Congress could easily change hands.

But much more than gas prices is at stake.

Weary Americans are on the knife-edge between saying the pandemic is over and fearing its return to take more lives. The loss of one million to the coronavirus echoes the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918, which spread after the First World War.

Those ghastly events colored the pessimistic prism of Eliot’s masterpiece poem.

Perhaps you know a friend or family member who was so careful about COVID-19 for two years and suddenly caught it this April. There is no clear consensus on the pandemic, which mirrors the deep cut in our body politic.

Public places, planes and trains are now opening up without mask mandates. We can only hope that a Donald Trump-appointed judge (who struck down travel mask mandates) knows better than public health experts.

The hatred on the faces of the white Trump mob who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was telling and fearful. Thousands came from every corner of the country in the pandemic. One in five were military veterans.

At the loser’s invitation (“will be wild”) they aimed to disrupt democracy’s unbroken custom of counting the 2020 Electoral College votes.

The pandemic also saw a sharp rise in pedestrian deaths, homicides and suicides across America. Therapists work overtime to treat anxiety and depression.

Introverts first thought Zoom answered their prayers. Extroverts and live performers wept with loneliness. Children missed their friends and a chunk of their childhood. Confinement does not agree with the American spirit, I know, right?

Our soul is at stake. We were never meant to be timid, the nation that conquered the frontier, won world wars and flew to the moon.

Simply put, this health crisis did not bring out the best in us, utterly lacking in unity. Most found that our private spheres and families could not fill our longing for the free public square.

April come she will, but will that fraught feeling of fear go?

(If Elon Musk takes social media’s throne, will he let the loser pretender back on Twitter?)

The cruelest April day in memory was when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, both beloved, died in April.

To be fair, bards also praise April as a muse of history and love.

Remember the midnight ride of Paul Revere (“Listen, my children, and you shall hear”) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Said Shakespeare: “O! how this spring of love resembleth/the uncertain glory of an April day.”

Key word: uncertain.