In Honor of National Poetry Month

I have a confession to make.  I really don't like to read poetry all that much.  I think its because I never had a really good poetry teacher.  Until recently.  My book group is blessed with several retired teachers, two of them high school English teachers.  Every April, our group reads a poet in honor of National Poetry Month.  Mary Lou, our poetry officianado, dutifully makes up packets of poems for us to read and delivers them to our houses because she knows that's the only way some of us will read them.  She prepares and leads a discussion that always catches me off guard.  I am always surprised at how much I end up liking the poems. And I always go home in awe that poetry and poets still have a place in today's fast paced world.  They do.  

This year we did a collection of nature poems - a subject I could surely relate to.  Mary Lou discussed the musical quality of the verse and poetry's place in oral history, making me realize how important this ancient art form is to our human experience and our ability to slow down and connect with our fellow man (and woman).  It was a gift.  As a result, I vow not to skim quite so quickly over the poetry section of the book store, or bury underneath my bedside stack, the book of poems I got from a friend for Christmas.  Mary Lou and my other teacher friends have helped me remember that poetry is to be read aloud many times, even sung, in order to be heard over the dense words of fiction and commentary. 

Here are two selections from our Nature Collection this month.  Sing them, read them aloud, appreciate poetry for its beauty and simplicity.  Then pass it on to someone else.

Some poets to check out...

Seamus Heaney        Billy Collins

Mary Oliver              Nikki Giovanni

Stanley Kunitz

Winter Promises

Marge Piercy (1936 - )

Tomatoes rosy as perfect baby's buttocks,

eggplants glossy as waxed fenders,

purple neon flawless glistening

peppers, pole beans fecund and fast

growing as Jack's Viagra-sped stalk,

big as truck tire zinnias that mildew

will never wilt, roses weighing down

a bush never touched by black spot,

brave little fruit trees shouldering up

their spottless ornaments of glass fruit:

I lie on the couch under a blanket

of seed catalogs ordering far

too much.  Sleet slides down

the windows, a wind edged

with ice knifes through ever crack.

Lie to me, sweet garden-mongers:

I want to believe every promise,

to trust in five pound tomatoes

and dahlias brighter than the sun

that was eaten by frost last week.

The Bat

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.

He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.

His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night.

Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,

We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place

When mice with wings can wear a human face.