April, come she will

We’re here at last.

The landscape still says winter, but it’s April on my calendar and in my heart. There’s a smidge of lightening in the air, the urge to dust the cobwebs away, to air the comforters and sweep the stairs.

M and I spent time over the past week sorting through all our books. We took each one down from its shelf, decided its fate (donate, sell, or keep), then sorted the keepers into categories and reshelved them. At least temporarily, all of the poetry is in one place, filling two whole shelves. That’s a nice way to start April: knowing where the poetry is. And just in time for National Poetry Month, too.

In addition to working on my own poetry every day, I’ll celebrate as I’ve done in past years, by updating this post with a link to a new poem each day in April.

How will you celebrate? Read a poem a day. Share a poem you love in the comments here. Write a poem. Put it in your pocket. Put it in a letter. Send the words out to the world.

Love unfolded then, like crumpled petals
opening into sunlight,
unfurling at the stroke of spring

as we walked the seven miles of estuary,
reaching, after long mudflats, the beach,
the windless bay, the candle of the lighthouse,
waxen in the hazy air that hung like gauze
between us and the islands

and through an undertow of sea-mist
came the warmth of April sun
nuzzling at our dazzled, new-born skin

–from “Solway”, by Elizabeth Burns

April 1 ~ Solway, by Elizabeth Burns
April 2 ~ Jack, by Maxine Kumiin
April 3 ~ Lares and Penates, by Caki Wilkinson
April 4 ~ Tam Lin, Scottish ballad (see also, Fairport Convention’s version, with Sandy Denny singing)
April 5 ~ Maple Syrup, by Donald Hall
April 6 ~ La Tortuga, by Pablo Neruda
April 7 ~ Spring, The Sky Rippled with Geese, by Ted Kooser
April 8 ~ Tell the Bees, by Sarah Lindsay
April 9 ~ The Sick Wife, by Jane Kenyon
April 10 ~ Surrounded by Wild Turkeys, by Gary Snyder
April 11 ~ Dirt Cowboy Café, by Cynthia Huntington
April 12 ~ Carrefour, by Amy Lowell
April 13 ~ The Underground, by Seamus Heaney
April 14 ~ To Earthward, by Robert Frost
April 15 ~ The Long Meadow, by Vijay Seshadri
April 16 ~ The Hive, by Ellen Bryant Voigt
April 17 ~ Walking in the Woods, by Grace Paley
April 18 ~ Brokeheart, Just like that, by Patrick Rosal
April 19 ~ The Layers, by Stanley Kunitz
April 20 ~ Animals, by Frank O’Hara
April 21 ~ Involution, by Cullen Bailey Burns
April 22 ~ In Breton, by Ian Stephen
April 23 ~ Where the Bee Sucks, There Suck I, and The Bees, by William Shakespeare
April 24 ~ Levin in Love, by Anne-Marie Turza
April 25 ~ I started Early – Took my Dog – , by Emily Dickinson
April 26 ~ Blueberry, by Diane Lockward
April 27 ~ Silence, by Marianne Moore
April 28 ~ Palindrome, by Lisel Mueller
April 29 ~ On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble, by A. E. Housman
April 30 ~ A Woman Written in as a Wren, by Mary Kane