Hey, everyone, it’s…
You can grab that logo there, and find tons of cool ideas for celebrating poetry, on the Academy of American Poets website. Memorize a poem! Create your own anthology on Poets.org! Watch a poetry movie! Most of all (sez me), get involved in local poetry events in your community. I’ve been a member of our local, relatively new Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and we are holding our third annual benefit gala this month on the 17th, along with our usual monthly poetry reading/open mic on the second Tuesday.
In honor of National Poetry Month, one of my favorite poems:
The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
