Poetry Month concludes in one day

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart
Deborah Digges (printed posthumously)

The wind blows
through the doors of my heart.
It scatters my sheet music
that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.
Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,
flattened against the screens.
The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds' nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through my rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love. And my dresses
they are lifted like brides come to rest
on the bedstead, crucifixes,
dresses tangled in trees in the rooms
of my heart. To save them
I've thrown flowers to fields,
so that someone would pick them up
and know where they came from.
Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.
Off with the clothesline pinning anything, my mother's trousseau.
It is not for me to say what is this wind
or how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.
Wing after wing, through the rooms of the dead
the wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,
no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.
It is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.
But we will never lie down again.

---

Poetry Month

I would be remiss to neglect and omit the fact that April is Poetry Month, and in my email box comes each day a poem from Knopf--a gesture they inaugurated many years ago and continue.

Today's poem is:


Theine
- Mary Kinzie from Drift

If compelled
to give it up
I would lift
as leaves do
loosened
from the tree
and feel the floating
thread of my thought
blown out
beyond itself
               line loose
               on the water
wandering
cinder
sleepier
than air

Spring Song II - Poetry Month

Herb garden coming to life, signs of Oregano and miniature flowers

A spring poem for Easter day by Jean Garrigue (1914-1972), anthologized in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets edition The Four Seasons, edited by J. D. McClatchy.

---

Spring Song II And now my spring beauties, Things of the earth, Beetles, shards and wings of moth And snail houses left From last summer's wreck, Now spring smoke Of the burned dead leaves And veils of the scent Of some secret plant, Come, my beauties, teach me, Let me have your wild surprise, Yes, and tell me on my knees Of your new life.

Bookworm: in recognition of Walt Whitman

Bookworm, a special at KCRW radio (Santa Monica, CA) brought together three modern poets, Eamon Grennan, Major Jackson and Pattiann Rogers to honour Walt Whitman, probably best known for Leaves of Grass.

The program is available by podcast and more than worth listening to for less than 30 minutes.

Excellent poets speaking with great affection and true understanding about Walt Whitman and sharing poems of their own.

"I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
Walt Whitman, Songs of Myself

Here is the complete text of Whitman's Song of Myself.

Poetry Month

For several years, perhaps as many as seven, Knopf has been sending out a poem a day in April, poetry month.

I received the first today, a poem by John Updike, recently deceased.