Favor of the Month: National Poetry Month

“April is the cruellest month…” So begins T.S. Eliot’s epic poem “The Wasteland.” Not so cruel anymore. These days, April is the month of the poet, a month of light-filled Saturdays, days devoted to the wayward ways of the poet so that poems might be both celebrated and made. What are the ways of the poet? How do poems get made? Pay attention, we often tell our students, to the world inside you and out. Pay attention or else, so says the speaker in James Wright’s poem “Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” so that you don’t come to the realization, at the end, that, “I have wasted my life.” So do yourself a favor. Do the world this favor. For the next thirty days, stop, drop, and listen, linger longer, slip inside a moment. It’s what us poets do, us lingerers, us stoppers and starers: we stop, we drop, we watch. We put words to what we see, hear, feel.

Stop by the InsideOut blog all month long for daily postings of new student poems from our 26 litmags forthcoming by spring’s end. Here you’ll find poems like this one from a 2nd grader who offers up these instructive words that invite us to look up and listen, to sing, to dance. To do, in short, what poets do. To be, in short, a poet.

What Time Is It

It is time to listen to the birds.
It is time to look up at the moon.
It is time to be like a star.

It is time to believe you can sing.
It is time to see you can dance.
There’s nothing more beautiful than a bird.

I love it when you sing, yes I do.

Mumtaz Shabazz