From the Poetry Stacks

Happy Poetry Month! Every April I write with  a community of poets, most of whom are teachers or former teachers. This poem is based on clipped phrases from other poems I've loved, with quoted poets noted in italics below my poem.  There is, I believe, a path poets travel across time and space, each of us looking for some nugget left behind by the twins truth and beauty. Sometimes, the landscape is so rocky, we may wonder if  those twins had lost their way. And yet, I remembered more nuggets than I could hold in one poem. These are the nuggets, I hold onto despite the world's present chaos. 

Because I do not go gentle into that good night, 

still I remember

the barefoot boy with cheek of tan, 

the toy dog covered with dust,

and the shadow that goes in and out with me;

still I remember discovering

the daffodils and bright blue squills

(and what are patterns for?);

I remember 

the sun and clear pebbles of the rain,

the wild geese high in the clean blue air. 

I remember  (may I always remember)

the flush of love’s light

even as ignorant armies clash by night.

I remember and again discover

a thunderbolt of beauty,

the poet’s anthem,

a fleeting word, a glimpse, a promise,

a song of praise, 

buried inside each burst of rage.

(Dylan Thomas, Eugene Fields, John Greenleaf Whittier, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Lowell, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, Matthew Arnold)