National Poetry Month: Fourth

This April, in honor of National Poetry Month, I'm posting a poem a week.  There are too many good ones out there to post them all, but this one stuck into me when I read it.  Short and to the point.  It's by Ko Un, called Asking the Way.

National Poetry Month: Third

In honor of National Poetry Month, this April I'm posting a poem every Monday. This week it's one by Meena Alexander, from Raw Meditations on Money, 1. She Speaks: A School Teacher from South India.  Go read something good for your soul.

National Poetry Month: Second

In honor of National Poetry Month, I'm posting a poem a week instead of my usual post.  This week it's Covenant by Alan R. Shapiro - a long one, and a bit of a doozy, but intimate and almost Norman Rockwell-ish in the way it immediately captures family and siblings.

National Poetry Month: First

In honor of National Poetry Month, this April I'm going to be posting a poem (or a link to a poem) a week instead of my usual post.  I've only got four weeks, but I hope I'll get in some good ones, on and off of the blog.  First up is Maya Angelou's Awaking in New York, over at the Poetry Foundation website.  Go read something good for your soul.

April is the cruelest month

If I'm being completely honest, I haven't been feeling the book love in April.  I don't know what it is - I flew through the first few months of the year, but at last it seems to have slowed.  I didn't continue most of the books I had checked out from the library, and didn't feel like reading anything.  I started and stopped, started and stopped (which is a bit what life feels like right now).  I'm not even gonna tell you what I'm reading now, I'm that ridiculous worried it won't stick.

My one reading relief has been National Poetry Month.  I love poetry - at its best, I think it can help cure almost any melancholy feeling, and it captures so much of what is beautiful in life.  I've been discovering new poems and poets through the Poetry Foundation, and have forged ahead with Yehuda Amichai and W.H. Auden, old favorites.

There is Walt Whitman too, a dog-eared companion, who so captures America (and life) for me I can't stand it.  Below is an excerpt from a poem he wrote after Abraham Lincoln was killed, called When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom'd:

Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
The gentle soft-born measureless light,
The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon,
The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

Go read the rest here - and have a beautiful spring weekend!