April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Month – April 17, 2008

"The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty."
( On the edifice of the Boston Public Library

In honor of National Library Week)

Spring

Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 18, 2008

Hope

Lisel Mueller

It hovers in dark corners

before the lights are turned on,

it shakes sleep from its eyes

and drops from mushroom gills,

it explodes in the starry heads

of dandelions turned sages,

it sticks to the wings of green angels

that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye

of the many-eyed potato,

it lives in each earthworm segment

surviving cruelty,

it is the motion that runs

from the eyes to the tail of a dog,

it is the mouth that inflates the lungs

of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift

we cannot destroy in ourselves,

the argument that refutes death,

the genius that invents the future,

all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear

not to betray one another,

it is in this poem, trying to speak.