National Poetry Month

I've been reading some of the poems posted on other blogs and thinking of various poems I've enjoyed over the years.

The book set I posted about the other day has a lot of poems in the first volume.

I've had part of the first verse of "The Fairies", by William Allingham, stuck in my head since childhood:

Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather.

(Which is, of course, what comes to mind when I read Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies.)

Growing up during the Cold War and being a treelover, naturally I loved and memorized David Ignatow's "Simultaneously":

Simultaneously, five thousand miles apart,
two telephone poles, shaking and roaring
and hissing gas, rose from their emplacements
straight up, leveled off and headed
for each other’s land, alerted radar
and ground defense, passed each other
in midair, escorted by worried planes,
and plunged into each other’s place,
steaming and silent and standing straight,
sprouting leaves.

As an introvert, Charles Simic's "Stone" is another favorite:

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

I have a dry and silly sense of humor, and thus a fondness for Ogden Nash:

The Termite
Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good!
And that is why your Cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.

And Shel Silverstein:

Early Bird
Oh, if you're a bird, be an early bird
And catch the worm for your breakfast plate.
If you're a bird, be an early early bird--
But if you're a worm, sleep late.

That's probably enough for one day.