Dear Friends,
Some things are very different for me this April: I am divorced, relocated, unemployed, and uninsured — in a period of great transition in my life, in every sense of the word. But some things are the same: April is still National Poetry Month, and I’m as determined as ever to celebrate it by sharing with all of you a bit of what I love about poetry — via one poem per day, delivered to your email inbox, for the duration of the month: 30 days. 30 poems. 30 poets.
No prior poetry experience is required! Enthusiasm, ability to read, and web access are the only prerequisites.
For the first time, I have also converted my poem-a-day email series to a blog: you can now find the archives for the past five years of poem-a-days here at meetmein811.blogspot.com. You are welcome to send friends and family who would like to join the poem-a-day list to the blog. As always, you can also learn more about National Poetry Month at the website of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.
So, again, Happy National Poetry Month! And thank you for celebrating with me.
Love, Ellen
Now, for today’s poem-a-day: Sometimes a scene, a tableau, a moment frozen in the mind, strikes a writer as inherently poetic not because of what’s there, but because the scene illustrates so precisely what is not there. A tableau, a poetic moment, can become a poem, and today’s poem-a-day is one of those — a poem about what is not there. Enjoy.
The night she walked to the house
she held a string; on the other end,
fifty-three feet in the air, a kite.
Wind provided the aerodynamics.
Does every collaboration
need to be explained?
She tied the string to the mailbox
left the kite to float until morning.
Every night this happens.
She sleeps, I listen, darkness
slides through us both.
The next morning
the string still curved into the sky
but the kite was gone.
This was the morning
newspapers announced
the Mona Lisa was stolen.
This was the morning
it snowed in Los Angeles,
the morning I wore gloves
to pull from the sky
fifty-three feet of frozen string.
“The Aerodynamics” by Rick Bursky from Death Obscura (2010)