Hopefully I'm Not Too Late...

...in giving you this reminder.

Tomorrow is National Poem in Your Pocket Day! Are you ready? While I am still up in the air about which poem I am planning to carry, one of my favorites from Wendell Berry has been popping up lately, so it is the one I will share in this entry to celebrate National Poetry Month. It is called The Peace of Wild Things.

When despair for the world grows in me 
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I also love these words about poetry that I received from a friend earlier today.

Poets, like detectives, know the truth is laborious: it doesn’t occur by accident, rather it is chiseled and worked into being, the product of time and distance and graft. The poet must be open to the possibility that she has to go a long way before a word rises, or a sentence holds, or a rhythm opens, and even then nothing is assured, not even the words that have staked their original claim or meaning. Sometimes it happens at the most unexpected moment, and the poet has to enter the mystery, rebuild the poem from there.

They come from the writer Colum McCann.

Now go find a poem before it's too late! (Though it's never too late for poetry!)

Let us walk in the holy presence.