Poetry

It's probably the most reviled poem in the English language, and for good reason. It's bad science, bad theology, and bad poetry. It probably gives trees a bad name, too. But it is, for all that, the one poem about trees that people remember. And the first two lines aren't too bad. Alfred Joyce Kilmer was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. For which sacrifice we should be grateful. In oh so many ways. Read more about Speaking of Trees

I have seen them in grown-over clearings in the woods, lilacs where no domestic flower should grow. I am told they mark the place where once a cabin stood and the lilac, carefully tended from a place further east and holding within its roots the scent of home, was planted in the dooryard.

Is there another flower of May so well loved as Lilac?

Lilacs

By Amy Lowell

Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers

Years ago, when a friend of mine was sent to prison for growing marijuana, I joined FAMM, Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Because my friend, on a first-time offense, was given a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years. A story for another time, but I wanted to explain why I spent a summer tabling at the summer fairs, handing out literature for FAMM in the early 90's. Collecting signatures on a petition. And the reason that some folks, although they were very sympathetic to the cause of marijuana, balked at another one of FAMM's goals. Read more about The Lives of Others

A long-ago lover once argued against the value of statistics in dictating a course of action by citing the case of a man killed in bed by a meteorite. The statistical chances of it happening, he told me, were very slim, but that slim chance meant nothing to the dead man. Read more about Who, Me? Worry?

Robert Hunter wrote Franklin's Tower for the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia put it to music. One verse goes like this:

In franklins tower the four winds sleep
Like four lean hounds the lighthouse keep
Wildflower seed on the sand and wind
May the four winds blow you home again.

I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see

TWO TRAMPS IN MUD TIME

(The third stanza brings to mind my own April poem, the first I chose for this year, and so closes the circle.)

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,

What is it about April? My two favorite long poems begin with April.

The Wasteland

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. I used to know these first 18 lines by heart.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

It's officially Spring, and if we're not quite certain of that yet, it is, for a fact, April. I wrote this poem about 35 years ago, on another April day that was a little too cold for comfort:

Spring comes down in a March wind
Flapping white sheets in my face
On a late April day north of Chicago.

Caroline in green with hair like
Dandelion silk
Sits in the new sun among the
Yellow flower faces.

The sheets snap like wet towels at my face and arms
And I laugh up into the ragged white flapping and
April blue sky.

Caroline is laughing and lifting up her arms,