April is National Poetry Month, named – in an ironic twist – after a line from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “April is the Cruelest Month.” Personally, I’d think they might have chosen June, since it has shown up in every cloying English rhyme since Earth captured the moon, but more pressing issues abound, so April it is.
Poetry is a lot like golf. Anyone who watches (or reads) it done well wants to try it him – or her – self, and yes, that includes me. Pandemics seem to have proven good times for poets, good and poor. Shakespeare penned King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra while sitting out the plague. Lessers, like me, have published prolifically during this long COVID season, perhaps because quarantines deterred critics from hurling stones at their efforts.
Since it is April, I offer this poor homage to a poet due our honor, whose time has only begun to blossom.
Of Emily
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickenson
I’m no poet of course
but I found today
I’ve had more pieces
published in my time
than Emily in all of hers
But of course she died
all too early after
once too often flirting
with that one last end
she could not stop for
while the opus of my work
is but passing bits and bytes
less lasting than one
of the breathless dashes
that punctuated her poems
which were all verses before
distilled to their essence
and hidden away in her
Pandoran chest until we
might dare sense her slant
I sometimes wonder
if there is another Emily
somewhere upstairs
in a lonely bedroom
penning music with words
and able at last to answer
Emily’s wistful wishes
but for now I know
she was the perfect poet
and I am mere prose
