Nothing Gold Can Stay: Happy Autumn!

We spent the second week of September exploring the Theodore Roosevelt National Park (also knows as the North Dakota Badlands), where we saw our first real glimpses of leaves changing color. What a glorious time to be there!

I love fall--the beauty of the variety of colors, the crisp morning air and warm days. But I am all too aware of impending winter, and the constant, slow change of nature. As I walk among the changing leaves, I think of Robert Frost's poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.

Please read the rest here. Go ahead, click. It's short.

Here's Frost himself reciting it:


and from me, with apologies to Frost,

Make the most of every day,
Grab what's golden on the way,
Knowing that it cannot stay,
Be thankful for the moment.

Happy Fall!

Of Walls and Neighbors: National Poetry Month

(By TR001 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Dave Healy is back with another poem, this time alluding to Robert Frost's famous "Mending Wall." 

Something There Is

If we build it will they come?
If we build it how high and long?

High enough to shut out the sun?
Long enough to enclose our fear?

Will one be enough?
Will it ever be enough?

Can a partition admit contrition?
Can we safely hedge our bets?

Who will watch o’er this rampart?
Who will help us unlearn long division?

Can we wall them out
without walling ourselves in?

When our progeny orbit this lonely planet
how many Great Walls will they see?

Hand me another brick.
I can still hear a heart beating.

By Ahazan (own work by Ahazan) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Thanks, Dave. 

What do you think? Do good fences make good neighbors?

Hear Robert Frost read his poem:

Choose Something Like a Star: Goodbye, National Poetry Month

By Henryk Kowalewski (http://www.ccd.neostrada.pl/HTM/Merope.htm) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

For one last National Poetry Month post, I chose the poem I used to give my graduating seniors back in my English teaching days. Something to reach for, something to hold onto, an appropriate way to launch into spring and continue through this divisive political season.

Choose Something Like a Star

by Robert Frost

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud-
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
Read the rest here.

Or listen to it, with music by Randall Thompson, photos from Hubble. This performance is by the New York Choral Society with the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Richard Auldon Clark:

Celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day--National Poetry Month

Poem in Your Pocket Day, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, encourages us to share poetry. Print off some of your favorite poems and put them in your pocket. When you meet and greet someone today, hand them the poem. Simple! Silly? Maybe, but I did it last year to great results. The poem recipients were really pleased. If you need poem ideas, click the Poem in Your Pocket Day link.

This year I decided to offer a Robert Frost poem that is not as well known as many of his others. I used to give this to the high school seniors I taught back in the day. Since graduation is approaching, and NASA just celebrated the Hubble telescope's 20th birthday, the poem in my pocket will be

Choose Something Like a Star

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
(Click to read the rest.)

Here's a NASA video of images from Hubble about a star's life:


Share some poems from your pocket to someone else's today and let me know the results!

Sensational Census--National Poetry Month

(photo by eiratansey www.flickr.com/photos/eiratansey/4405866236/)

In addition to Poetry Month and Jazz Appreciation Month, it's Census Month! You have no doubt completed and returned your form. Thoughts and feelings about the census vary widely, as the poems below show.

The census can answer questions such as "What areas have gained population?" Here's a Robert Frost poem about the opposite situation:

The Census-Taker

I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening
To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house
Of one room and one window and one door,
The only dwelling in a waste cut over
A hundred square miles round it in the mountains:
(continue reading here).

(photo by Jason Pratt http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Creek_State_Park_Shack.jpg)

Some folks are not happy to see a census taker at the door. Hear what Madam has to say to the census taker in Langston Hughes' poem. (Scroll and click "play" next to the + sign.)

When the census results are released, we will know how many people live where, how many live in their own homes, how many live in each home, and other statistics. All these numbers remind me of one of W.H. Auden's poems:

The Unknown Citizen

"He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint(continue reading here)

What do you think of the census? Regardless of your opinion, you count!