Poetry Month

"A New Day"

Henry Margetson

Oh, I still miss Garrison Kellior's "Writer's Almanac" blog.  He really had a knack for picking accessible, simple poems for his daily selections.  April is National Poetry Month by the way. Something to consider in this time of relentless, numbing news headlines.

Thomas Lynch, funeral director and prizewinning poet, said this about poetry:

I can always tell when I haven't been getting enough.  My ears begin to ache with the low din of disorder and the noisome burdens of the information age begin to overwhelm and when everything begins to sound like everything else...then I know I haven't been getting enough poetry. A daily dose would, like an apple or exercise or the habit of prayer, serve as a preventative against most vexations.


And here's a favorite, from a previous Writer's Almanac:

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?