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You may not have heard but April is Jazz Appreciation Month, National Volunteer Month, National Pecan Month, National Grilled Cheese Month, Financial Literacy Month along with about a dozen other special awareness designations. Most significantly for me personally is the fact that it is also National Poetry Month. Seems like an opportune time to recognize several poets and how they actually regard the thirty days set aside to honor their craft. Yes, you may applaud.
“April is the cruelest month,” or so begins the highly distinguished American-British author T. S. Eliot in his 1922 masterful poem The Waste Land. In his hopeless view of post-World War I civilization, he laments that Spring’s new beginnings are but the start of another inescapable cycle of hurt, failure and sadness.
Poet, playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Edna St. Vincent Millay mirrored her contemporary Eliot in her poem Spring, penned in 1923. In just a few verses of collective grief, anger, and disillusionment felt in the aftermath of the war, she asks “To what purpose April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough.” Eleven disturbing lines later she concludes that “Life itself is nothing, an empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down the hill, April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”
Five centuries earlier, the “Father of English Literature,” Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote from a more positive perspective. In his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, he praises “Aprille with his shoures soote,” or the month when sweet showers “The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,” restoring life and fertility to the earth. It’s perfect weather for a pilgrimage!
Presumably written as long ago as the early 1600’s, the familiar rhyme “April showers bring May flowers” has survived in popular notoriety more so than any of those mentioned above. Such a childlike expression of simplicity, it is much more than a fact of nature. It is hope, faith in the unseen.
Now in my own lifetime, Robert Frost, unofficial poet laureate of the United States, wrote in his A Prayer in Spring, “Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; And give us not to think so far away As the uncertain harvest; keep us here, All simply in the springing of the year.” Indeed, a prayer for living in the moment of rebirth, with gratitude.
I had none of these thoughts in mind when months ago I wrote the following, but it seems appropriate nonetheless, especially for this month celebrating poetry and restoration:
I love the smell of rain
Difficult to describe, so organic,
Nature’s mix of soil and cloud,
a faint precursor to a Spring shower
or Summer storm, a hint or a warning.
I sense it creeping ever closer
when sparrows fall from aloft,
seeking cover while from the distance
like an overture to a Mozart Requiem,
I hear the deep groans of rolling thunder.
Then with hands raised up to a brooding sky
my soul must answer and sing,
My Savior God to Thee, how great Thou art.
How great Thou art!
Crossing Paths 