So, I heard today was National Poetry Day. Now, I’m not sure if it’s just the in the UK or if it’s here in the US, too. I’ve decided to honor the day anyway. Besides, it’s never not a good time for poetry, honey. For the past three years, a fellow writer and friend of mine write and share one poem a day throughout the entire month of April, which is, you probably guessed it, National Poetry Month.

It’s not that I’m a poet by any stretch, but I’ve always loved the lyrical nature and musicality of poetry. One day, in a graduate writing course, I asked the professor what poetry actually was. At the time, I knew enough about poetry to know that I didn’t really understand the genre. So, who better to ask than a poetry professor, I figured. He looked at me indcredulous. What? he snickered. No one ever told you what poetry is?

It took me a while to shake the embarrassed feeling of being singled out in class like that. Afterward, I asked a classmate in confidence whether she thought I was dense because I didn’t seem to process things the way everyone else did. She reassured me I wasn’t and confided that she didn’t get it, either.

I guess that’s why Poetry Day and Poetry Month have special meaning for me: they remind me I get to love what I love without the need to explain the joy out of it or run it past someone else’s definition of what’s good or not.

With that, allow me to share two poems that have captured my attention all over again.

∞   ∞   ∞

Homage to my Hips

by Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips.

they need space to 
move around in.

they don’t fit into little
petty places.

these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,
they

go where they want to go 
they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.

i have known them
to put a spell on a man

and 
spin him like a top

∞   ∞   ∞

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and

the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the

clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

- – - – - – -

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