Monday (Winter’s Last Gasp) Musings

This poem welcomed me when I walked into my office this morning (I have a poem a day calendar):

First Blush

A freak spring snowstorm makes us take old
toute along a creek that flushes, gushes, touches
off tremors of foaming water so cold
and bright we know we’ve come to a sources,
the beginning rush of water’s course
that later will slake the thirst of millions–
but now we are alone with it and know
its potential. Possibility plays before us.
It fizzes and spills through consciousness,
rolling its April of yeses through groves
it will melt by noon, forcing
a green through naked fields, through us.

Molly Peacock

The first line of this poem is eerily relevant, as this morning I awoke to snow flurries and the prediction that the temp would drop down to the low 30s this evening. I knew the mild weather, sunshine, and flowering trees were all a little too good to be true, but snow flurries in April? Get out of here winter. I’m over you.
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A friend of mine already posted this link via Facebook, but for those who are not slaves to the social networks (I am one of those slaves) here it is again:

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone.

I plan on sharing this article with my creative writing class Thursday night. They are required to memorize a poem for their poetry presentations.
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I have not jumped on the write a poem a day bandwagon for National Poetry Month, but I have been thinking a lot lines of poetry lately or just images that pop into my head that could eventually turn into poems. Yesterday, while driving along a street lined with magnolias, I started thinking about trees shedding petals, silken petals, and how those petals take on a translucent quality, kind of like skin or paper. And how when we walk over these petals, we leave our footprints, much in the way people leave their mark of words on paper. I don’t if that will amount to anything, but it kept me occupied for about an hour.