T.S. Eliot on April

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding  
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  
Memory and desire, stirring  
Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
First 4 lines

Chaucer on April

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,

And smale fowles maken melodye

That slepen al the night with open ye

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes couthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende

Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende

The holy blisful martir for to seke

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

First 18 lines

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340(?)–1400)

Sonnet

Sonnet
by Billy Collins

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played

and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blowout the lights, and come at last to bed.

 "Sonnet" by Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room. © Random House, 2002.

Wear

Wear
by Philip Booth


I hate how things wear out.


Not elbows, collars, cuffs;
they fit me, lightly frayed.


Not belts or paint or rust,
not routine maintenance.


On my own hook I cope
with surfaces: with all


that rubs away, flakes off, or fades
on schedule. What eats at me


is what wears from the in-
side out: bearings, couplings,


universal joints, old
differentials, rings,


and points: frictions hidden
in such dark they build


to heat before they come
to light. What gets to me


is how valves wear, the slow
leak in old circuitry,


the hairline fracture under
stress. With all my heart

I hate pumps losing prime,
immeasurable over-


loads, ungauged fatigue
in linkages. I hate


myself for wasting time
on hate: the cost of speed


came with the bill of sale,
the rest was never under


warranty. Five years
ago I turned in every


year; this year I rebuild
rebuilt parts. What hurts


is how blind tired I get. 


"Wear" by Philip Booth, from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999. © Viking, 1999. 

After a Month of Rain

After a Month of Rain
by Linda Pastan


Everything I thought I wanted
is right here,
particularly when the sun
is making such a comeback,


and the lilac engorged
with purple has recovered
from its severe pruning,
and you will be back soon


to dispel whatever it is
that overtakes me like leaf blight,
even on a day like this. I can still
hear remnants of the rain


in the swollen stream
behind the house, in the faint
dripping under the eaves,
persistent as memory.

And all the things I didn't think
I wanted, cut like the lilac back
to the root, push up again
from underground. 


"After a Month of Rain" by Linda Pastan, from Traveling Light. © W.W. Norton & Co., 2011.


From the Writer's Almanac

Another View of your Paunch

Self-Portrait as a Bear

by Donald Hall

Here is a fat animal, a bear
that is partly a dodo.
Ridiculous wings hang at his shoulders
as if they were collarbones
while he plods in the bad brickyards
at the edge of the city, smiling
and eating flowers. He eats them
because he loves them
because they are beautiful
because they love him.
It is eating flowers which makes him so fat.
He carries his huge stomach
over the gutters of damp leaves
in the parking lots in October,
but inside that paunch
he knows there are fields of lupine

and meadows of mustard and poppy.
He encloses sunshine.
Winds bend the flowers
in combers across the valley,
birds hang on the stiff wind,
at night there are showers, and the sun
lifts through a haze every morning
of the summer in the stomach.

"Self-Portrait as a Bear" by Donald Hall, from White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1964-2006. © Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.

 clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

The good, the bad and the inconvenient

The good, the bad and the inconvenient

by Marge Piercy

Gardening is often a measured cruelty:
what is to live and what is to be torn
up by its roots and flung on the compost
to rot and give its essence to new soil.

It is not only the weeds I seize.
go down the row of new spinach—
their little bright Vs crowding—
and snatch every other, flinging

their little bodies just as healthy,
just as sound as their neighbors
but judged, by me, superfluous.
We all commit crimes too small

for us to measure, the ant soldiers
we stomp, whose only aim was to
protect, to feed their vast family.

It is I who decide which beetles
are "good" and which are "bad"
as if each is not whole in its kind.
We eat to live and so do they,
the locusts, the grasshoppers,

the flea beetles and aphids and slugs.
By bad I mean inconvenient. Nothing
we do is simple, without consequence
and each act is shadowed with death.

"The good, the bad and the inconvenient" by Marge Piercy, from The Crooked Inheritance. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.