A Toast to World Poetry Day

Langston Hughes . . . Yeats and Keats . . . Shakespeare and Wendell Berry each farming words in their own unique ways. . . Audin, ah, Audin . . . and a little-known poet from West Virginia* who writes of walking in a rain no one would be caught dead in without a Bible . . . Naomi Shahab Nye . . . Chesterton . . . Wordsworth (how could he have been anything but a poet?) . . . Rilke raining beauty within beauty upon all who care to know . . . Dylan and Baez and Simon and Byrne and Bowie – poets of my youth and age in a time when poetry is best (or at least most memorably) found in music . . .

I read on fb that it’s World Poetry Day today (well, actually, it was yesterday – my invite must have gotten lost in the mail).

Poetry has been, for me, an acquired taste come comparatively late in life.

If there must be favorite, I suppose today, this day (for it may be different tomorrow – it was yesterday), Leonard Cohen is the placeholder of my heart.  And so I leave you with Anthem . . .

The birds they sang 

at the break of day 

Start again 

I heard them say 

Don't dwell on what 

has passed away 

or what is yet to be. 

Ah the wars they will 

be fought again 

The holy dove 

She will be caught again 

bought and sold 

and bought again 

the dove is never free. 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack in everything 

That's how the light gets in. 

We asked for signs 

the signs were sent: 

the birth betrayed 

the marriage spent 

Yeah the widowhood 

of every government -- 

signs for all to see. 

I can't run no more 

with that lawless crowd 

while the killers in high places 

say their prayers out loud. 

But they've summoned, they've summoned up 

a thundercloud 

and they're going to hear from me. 

Ring the bells that still can ring ... 

You can add up the parts 

but you won't have the sum 

You can strike up the march, 

there is no drum 

Every heart, every heart 

to love will come 

but like a refugee. 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That's how the light gets in. 

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack, a crack in everything 

That's how the light gets in. 

That's how the light gets in. 

That's how the light gets in.

______________
*Llewellyn McKernan, My Own History, in Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia.