Morning Open Thread: This Whole Experiment of Green

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So grab your cuppa, and join in!

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Since April is National Poetry Month, and also notorious as a month of changeable weather, I offer you some Spring and April poems to start off the week.

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Just Before April Came

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by Carl Sandburg

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THE SNOW piles in dark places are gone.

Pools by the railroad tracks shine clear.

The gravel of all shallow places shines.

A white pigeon reels and somersaults.

*

Frogs plutter and squdge—and frogs beat the air

with a recurring thin steel sliver of melody.

Crows go in fives and tens; they march their black feathers

 past a blue pool; they celebrate an old festival.

A spider is trying his webs, a pink bug sits on my hand

washing his forelegs.

I might ask: Who are these people?

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Always Marry An April Girl

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by Ogden Nash

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Praise the spells and bless the charms,

I found April in my arms.

April golden, April cloudy,

Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;

April soft in flowered languor,

April cold with sudden anger,

Ever changing, ever true –

I love April, I love you.

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Song Of A Second April

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by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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April this year, not otherwise

Than April of a year ago,

Is full of whispers, full of sighs,

Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;

Hepaticas that pleased you so

Are here again, and butterflies.

*

There rings a hammering all day,

And shingles lie about the doors;

In orchards near and far away

The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;

The men are merry at their chores,

And children earnest at their play.

*

The larger streams run still and deep,

Noisy and swift the small brooks run

Among the mullein stalks the sheep

Go up the hillside in the sun,

Pensively,—only you are gone,

You that alone I cared to keep.

*

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Sonnet 98 – From you I have been absent in the spring

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by William Shakespeare

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From you have I been absent in the spring,

When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,

Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,

That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him,

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell

Of different flowers in odor and in hue,

Could make me any summer's story tell,

Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew.

Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;

They were but sweet, but figures of delight,

Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,

As with your shadow I with these did play.

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A little Madness in the Spring

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by Emily Dickinson

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A little Madness in the Spring

Is wholesome even for the King,

But God be with the Clown –

Who ponders this tremendous scene –

This whole Experiment of Green –

As if it were his own!

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American Pharoah

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by Ada Limón

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Despite the morning’s gray static of rain,

we drive to Churchill Downs at 6 a.m.,

eyes still swollen shut with sleep. I say,

Remember when I used to think everything

was getting better and better? Now, I think

it’s just getting worse and worse. I know it’s not

what I’m supposed to say as we machine our

way through the silent seventy minutes on 64

over pavement still fractured from the winter’s

wreckage. I’m tired. I’ve had vertigo for five

months and on my first day home, he’s shaken

me awake to see this horse, not even race, but

work. He gives me his jacket as we face

the deluge from car to the twin spire turnstiles,

and once deep in the fern-green grandstands, I see

the crowd. A few hundred maybe, black umbrellas,

cameras, and notepads, wet-winged eager early birds

come to see this Kentucky-bred bay colt with his

chewed-off tail train to end the almost 40-year

American Triple Crown drought. A man next to us,

some horseracing heavy, ticks off a list of reasons

why this horse—his speed-laden pedigree, muscle

and bone recovery, et cetera, et cetera—could never

win the grueling mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes.

Then, the horse with his misspelled name comes out,

first just casually cantering with his lead horse,

and next, a brief break in the storm, and he’s racing

against no one but himself and the official clocker,

monstrously fast and head down so we can see

that faded star flash on his forehead like this

is real gladness. As the horse eases up and we

close our mouths to swallow, the heavy next to us

folds his arms, says what I want to say too: I take it all back.

*

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Poems

• “Just Before April Came” from The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg,© 197o by Lilian Steichen Sandburg, Trustee – Harcourt, Brace & Company
• “The Waste Land” from T.S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909-1962, © 1991 by Esme Valerie Eliot – Harcourt, Brace & Company
• “Always Marry an April Girl” from The Best of Ogden Nash,© 2007 by Linell Nash Smith – Ivan. R. Dee, publisher
• “Song Of A Second April” from Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1956 –
• HarperCollins
• “Sonnet 98 – From you I have been absent in the spring” by William Shakespeare
• “A little Madness in the Spring” by Emily Dickinson
• “American Pharoah”© 2015 by Ada Limón. Originally published in the Winter 2015 issue of Prairie Schooner

Visuals

• Coffee mug with flower umbrella
• Three crows in flight
• Sunshine and rain
• Hepaticas
• David Bowie in flowers
• Child with painted face – Myanmar
• American Pharoah

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

Happy national Poetry Month!