National Poetry Month

You may have heard by now that April is National Poetry Month (and if you did hear that, did you hear that the week of April 1-7 is National Root Canal Awareness Week?).


I've been thinking about the poems I wrote earlier in my life, the pathetic ones I wrote in junior high school, and the passionate ones I wrote later that I liked. I haven't written anything more complex than a limerick in ten years and I wrote a song one time, with help from The Killer Lady. I don't know what made that one a song, but it felt different from a poem even while I was writing it. In fact I was almost humming while it was coming together.


My favorite poem is "This Is Just To Say" by William Carlos Williams. I just read that the reader "is free to decide whether it is 'about' temptation, a re-enactment of the fall, or the triumph of the physical over the spiritual." I don't think it's any of these; I think that it's an unadorned and simple refrigerator note. I imagine that the apology is offered before the recipient knows the plums are gone, and in that sense is a confession and a demonstration of honesty: Not for one moment will there be any question about what happened to the plums. Sometimes it is difficult to offer an apology. Receiving one can be as sweet as a plum.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold