I love that it's National Poetry Month. Heck, I love that National Poetry Month exists at all, but there's something appropriate about it being in April. April is just-Spring, when the world is mud-luscious. April is also the cruelest month. Poetry conveys both sentiments, and everything in between.

When I was in second and third grade, I got pulled out of class every week or so with about five other kids for Poetry Enrichment. Well, that's what I call it now. I didn't have a name for it then. I think I just called it Poetry. Back then all I knew was that a few other smart misfits and I would head to an empty classroom at an appointed time, and a long-haired, flowy-skirted, bespectacled woman would be waiting for us with a stack of mimeographed pages, damp and heavy with purple ink. Somehow I picked up on the other teachers' feeling that this woman was a little daft. But I loved the experience.

We read poems, we did the grade-school version of "analysis" of them, we memorized them, and, if I jimmy the lock on that steamer trunk of awkward repressed memory, I think we actually recited them at a class assembly. We learned a lot of Lewis Carroll. I still know "Jabberwocky" backwards and forwards, and have a traumatic spelling bee experience related to the word "chortle." "The Walrus and the Carpenter" still makes me giggle. I didn't know back then what a vacant and pensive mood was all about, but I longed for a field of daffodils anyway.

I have no idea who tapped me for this group. Did a note go home for my parents to sign? Did a teacher take it upon herself to nudge me into this group? Or did the school issue a blanket invitation that I accepted? I probably won't ever know exactly how it happened, but I owe the universe a debt of gratitude.

Here is one of my favorite poems.

"Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~ Mary Oliver