It's Poetry Month!

Every April for about a decade (as far as I can tell) I have received daily poems from Knopf Poetry to celebrate Poetry Month. I highly recommend it; sign up here.

I’m pretty facile with verse, but I don’t consider myself a poet. It’s too much work, and those who are really good at it don’t need the competition.

However, in celebration of the first day of Poetry Month, I’ll drag out two poems. The first I wrote decades ago, and it still stands as a nice description of the Tao of life and art:

Throwing stones without aim: so where
they land is good, or there is all right, too.
Es macht nichts, it doesn’t matter. Air
falls, doesn’t hinder rubble, lets it through.
Turn upon determined point. Now throw.
Air feathers, pulls, prevents, does not assist
the arc, affixes where the stone must go,
makes the fact, the truth of hit or missed.
Or toss the stone into a wet, blank stream.
Currents stop their placid rush along
their course and splash against deflected dream.
The obstacle has set up right and wrong.
Our goals become, then, not a target which
we hit, but tend to miss: and that’s the bitch.

This one is more typical of my output:

No one mourns the armadillo,
No one sighs, so o’er-woe’d.
No one plants the yew or willow
Where he lies beside the road.

Probably needs more verses, that one.