April is Poetry Month--a poem for each day we are open

For Saturday April 4th

Three Dog Neighborhood
Chosen by Eliza (Why I will always have a Rottweiler)

By Daniel Barth

Pretty Straightforward this one,
About my friend Pete and his wife Susan.
They bought an old house in Denver
Down on the Platte River.
Shortly thereafter their tv got stolen.
They bought a dog, a good-sized dog,
To keep an eye on things.
But it didn't help, they were burgled again.
This time the investigating officer said:
"You live in a three dog neighborhood."
"Huh?" said Pete (not in a good mood)
"One for the front yard, one for the back yard,
One for the house," explained the cop--
Three dog neigborhood,"
"Yeah right," said Pete, "Now I'm hip."



Donna's Choice
Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 4, 2009

Anniversary: One Fine Day
by Walter McDonald

Who would sit through a plot as preposterous as ours,
married after years apart? Chance meetings may work
early in stories, but at operas, darling, in Texas?
A bachelor pilot, I fled Laredo for the weekend,
stopping at the opera from boredom, music I least expected.
Of all the zoos and honky-tonks south of Dallas,
who would believe I would find you there on the stairs,

Madame Butterfly about to start? When you moved
four years before, I lost all hope of dying happy,
dogfighting my way through pilot training, reckless,
in terror only when I saw the man beside you.
I had pictured him rich and splendid in my mind
a thousand times, thinking you married with babies
somewhere in Tahiti, Spain, the south of France.

When I saw the lucky devil I hated – only your date,
but I didn’t know – he stopped gloating, watching you wave,
turned old and bitter like the crone in Shangri La.
Destiny happens only in plays and cheap movies –
but here, here on my desk is your photo, decades later,
and I hear sounds from another room of our house,
and when I rise amazed and follow, you are there.

April is Nation Poetry Month

In Memory of
Dori Anderson
1938-2008

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 4, 2008

SEAMUS HEANEY, from The Cure At Troy

Human beings suffer,

They torture one another,

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols

Beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

Stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:

The utter, self-revealing

Double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.

It means once in a lifetime

That justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

Ukiah Library Poem of the day for National Poetry Month, April 4th

by Emily Dickenson

Just lost, when I was saved!

Just felt the world go by!

Just girt me for the onset with Eternity

When breath blew back

And on the other side

I heard recede the disappointed tide

Therefore, as One returned, I feel

Odd secrets of the line to tell!

Some Sailor, skirting foreign shores-

Some pale Reporter, from the awful doors

Before the Seal!

Next time, to stay!

Nest time, the things to see

By Ear unheard,

Unscrutinized by Eye

Next time, to tarry,

While the Ages steal

Slow tramp the centuries

And the Cycles wheel!