Pacific Daylight Time

Today was the last day of April, the last day of National Poetry month, and the Secondary Literacy folks gathered after school at one of our favorite happy hour spots to mark the occasion and share some our favorite, memorable, or otherwise appropriately selected poems.I sometimes have trouble making choices--you know narrowing things down, so I brought three poems (and read them all). Here are two below. A very cool one that is new to me and one that is an old favorite.*

Some Like Poetry

Some -
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
and poets themselves,
there will be perhaps two in a thousand.

Like -
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry -
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

--- Wislawa Szymborska

The Lake Isle

O GOD, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,

Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,

With the little bright boxes

piled up neatly upon the shelves

And the loose fragrant cavendish

and the shag,

And the bright Virginia

loose under the bright glass cases,

And a pair of scales not too greasy,

And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,

For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,

Lend me a little tobacco-shop,

or install me in any profession

Save this damn'd profession of writing,

where one needs one's brains all the time.

Ezra Pound

I also ordered the book Poem in Your Pocket. It's a nifty thing designed so that the poems can be pulled out and carried around or given away or whatever. I look forward to finding some new gems.

KM

*The third one I read is "Archaic Torso of Apollo", which is already on my blog in an earlier entry.