Let the poemapalooza begin!

April 1, 2018 in poetry

April is National Poetry Month.

I know, I know.

You don’t do poetry. You lost the urge for it when your English teacher made you beat it senseless.

Come back to the word that captures a world.

Each April I feature a poem every day on 37days. It is my way of reentering the rhythm of life through words that slow me down, make me see things I miss, help me understand what is beneath the surface of a thing. Words buoy us and thrill us; they express things we didn’t know could be expressed. They are magical.

We need not understand poems to appreciate the words that form them. We can recognize ourselves in them instead. I suggest every poem be read aloud, repeatedly, and copied by hand onto notebook paper, as I have done daily for many years. The act of that transcription slows us down again, enables us to form the words in our own hand, puts the point of creation closer to us.

Come, let’s make our lives a poem.

Not Forgotten

by Toi Derricotte

I love the way the black ants use their dead.

They carry them off like warriors on their steel

backs. They spend hours struggling, lifting,

dragging (it is not grisly as it would be for us,

to carry them back to be eaten),

so that every part will be of service. I think of

my husband at his father’s grave—

the grass had closed

over the headstone, and the name had disappeared. He took out

his pocket knife and cut the grass away, he swept it

with his handkerchief to make it clear. “Is this the way

we’ll be forgotten?” And he bent down over the grave and wept.

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.