April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Library Month
April 22, 2008

WANTING MORE AND MORE

TO LIVE UNOBSERVED, UNOBSERVING

Jane Hirshfield

Wanting more and more to live unobserved,

unobserving,

like a dog who takes the bone and goes to another room

where it just fits under the low-legged table or couch.

In the farthest depths, no sunlight reaches.

Yet certain fish, now eyeless streak with luminescence

when excited;

a lowered bathyspere turns on a floodlight

and is mobbed, the strange-formed bodies drawing in for miles.

No one was ever meant to see this.

Certainly not the fish, who see nothing, whose

tentacles travel the cold light, and no one know how or why.

Like human beings to a mystery

They imagine feels some passion for their fate.

And the dog? Fallen into the marrow-pleasure completely.

Willits Library National Library Month Poem of the Day April 22, 2008

Special Earth Day Poem

Philip Appleman

Last-Minute Message for a Time Capsule

I have to tell you this, whoever you are:

that on one summer morning here, the ocean

pounded in on tumbledown breakers,

a south wind, bustling along the shore,

whipped the froth into little rainbows,

and a reckless gull swept down the beach

as if to fly were everything it needed.

I thought of your hovering saucers,

looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,

so it wouldn’t be lost forever –

that once upon a time we had

meadows here, and astonishing things,

swans and frogs and luna moths

and blue skies that could stagger your heart.

We could have had them still,

and welcomed you to earth, but

we also had the righteous ones

who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.

When you go home to your shining galaxy,

say that what you learned

from this dead and barren place is

to beware the righteous ones.