Squirrel • National Poetry Month

Thank you for spending National Poetry Month here with us at Hedgehog Lover. Keep reading poetry, keep sharing poetry, and keep loving poetry!

Squirrel

It's not a dignified end, dangling

from my fingers, held fast with

a candy wrapper salvaged from

my car floor. I found no napkin, so

I improvised, judging the safety

of the road while drudging about

for a makeshift shroud.

                                     She is small,

light, and I whisper a prayer. No,

more of an apology: had it been me,

I would have stopped, she would have

made it across. When one stops,

others follow, whether out of shame

or habit or kindness I never can tell.

I lay her gently at the curb, tuck

the wrapper under her, too small for a shroud.

A prayer, unbidden, escapes my lips:

for her, for me, for the careless driver

who brought us here, together, on the side

of the now-quiet road. It’s too late for

the peace I beg for in my fervent whisper.

It’s too late for us both.

By Chris Fow Cohen
Shared with the author's permission

The Ring • National Poetry Month

The Ring

Soon my father will lose his wedding ring
but before that happens we take the path
along the cliff-edge past the sign that says
Danger: Keep Back because the waves below
have undermined it, and the next big storm
will be enough to bring the whole face down.

I know this but I can’t help looking down
and noticing how each wave throws a ring
of pretty foam that’s nothing like a storm
round fallen rocks forming a sort of path
for someone who might find themselves below
which no one ever would, my father says.

It’s much too dangerous, my father says,
new rock-falls any time might tumble down
and injure them, and while the sea below
looks calm, a quickly-rising tide would ring
and terrify them, devastate the path,
then drown them just as surely as a storm.

I hear him out about the calm and storm
and fall in line with everything he says,
continuing along the cliff-top path
until it leads us in a zig-zag down
onto the sea-shore where a wormy ring
of sand recalls the tunneling below.

My father says the North Sea is below
freezing almost, thanks to a recent storm,
and so he eases off his wedding ring
because the cold is bound to shrink, he says,
his fingers, and his ring would then slip down
and vanish like the dangerous cliff path.

He turns around to see once more the path,
the dizzy fall, the rocks, the waves below.
He thinks his only choice is to set down
on one stone of the many that the storm
has carried from their North Sea bed, which says
a lot about the power of storms, his ring.

It slides down out of sight as though the storm
has also switched his path to run below.
This neither of us says. He never finds his ring.

by Andrew Motion
Courtesy poets.org

Photograph of Earth From Space • National Poetry Month

Photograph of Earth

From Space

On the outskirts of Luanda, Angola,

Gerald Nduma has walked an hour to school

carrying his chair, which is really

an empty coffee can. Nine years old,

 he holds in his other hand a mango which

will be his lunch.At school,

which is really a tree, Gerald

places his lunch beneath his chair.

This day, a missionary has come

With magazines. Gerald takes what

is given him. Soon he does not hear

the teacher’s instructions. He does not hear

the students’ chatter. He is looking

at the photograph of Earth

floating in a dark sea

which Gerald imagines

is plenteous with fish.

By Pamela Porter

Courtesy Poets.ca

The League of Canadian Poets

Trees • National Poetry Month

Happy Arbor Day!

Trees

I think that I shall never see 

A poem lovely as a tree. 

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest 

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast; 

A tree that looks at God all day, 

And lifts her leafy arms to pray; 

A tree that may in Summer wear 

A nest of robins in her hair; 

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; 

Who intimately lives with rain. 

Poems are made by fools like me, 

But only God can make a tree.

by Joyce Kilmer

courtesy Poetry Foundation

Migration • National Poetry Month

It's Poem in Your Pocket Day! Print multiple copies of this poem and keep one copy in your pocket, then scatter the rest.

Leave them on your desk, or on the train. Put them in the lunch room. Hand them to strangers or friends. Share them liberally.

Migration

The police squint 

into the glare on the water looking 

for small boats. On a clear day 

the lightkeeper sees all the way 

to Algeria. Over his sofa 

hangs a tapestry woven 

by his grandmother from red 

human hair. Only the birds 

travel without papers. 

Though often now 

their tiny legs 

when they perch 

on the lighthouse railings 

are colour banded.

by Eleonore Schönmaier

courtesy poets.ca
The League of Canadian Poets

If All of My Relationships Fail and I Have No Children Do I Even Know What Love Is • National Poetry Month

If All of My Relationships Fail and I Have No Children Do I Even Know What Love Is

This fireman comes every afternoon
to the café on the corner
dressed for his shift in clean dark blues
This time       it’s the second Wednesday of January
and he’s meeting his daughter again
who must be five or six
and who is always waiting for her father like this
in her charcoal gray plaid skirt
with green and red stripes
She probably comes here straight from school
her glasses a couple nickels thick
 
By now I know     that she can sit       (except
for her one leg swinging from the chair)  
absolutely still      while her father pulls   
fighters’ wraps from his work bag
and begins half way down the girl’s forearm
winding the fabric in overlapping spirals
slowly toward her fist           then     he props      
her wrist      like a pro    on his own hand 
unraveling the black cloth   weaving it   
between her thumb and forefinger
around the palm             taut but
not so much that it cuts off the blood          then
up the hand and between the other fingers
to protect the knuckles         the tough    
humpback guppies just under the skin  
 
He does this once with her left       then again
to her right   To be sure her pops knows he has done
a good job     she nods        Good job       Good 
Maybe you’re right              I don’t know what love is
A father kisses the top of his daughter’s head
and knocks her glasses cockeyed
He sits back and downs the last of the backwash
in his coffee cup         They got 10 minutes to kill
before they walk across the street    down the block
and out of sight         She wants to test
her dad’s handiwork            by throwing  
a couple jab-cross combos from her seat
There is nothing in the daughter’s face  
that says     she is afraid     
There is nothing in the father’s face       
to say he is not                     He checks his watch         
then holds up his palms    as if to show his daughter    
that nothing is burning                     In Philadelphia
there are fires      I’ve seen those  in my lifetime too

by Patrick Rosal
Courtesy poets.org

Wolf’s Trees • National Poetry Month

In memory of J.D. McClatchy, who died two weeks ago.

Wolf’s Trees

If trees fall in a wood and no one hears them,
Do they exist except as a page of lines
That words of rapture or grief are written on?
They are lines too while alive, pointing away
From the primer of damped air and leafmold
That underlie, or would if certain of them
Were not melon or maize, solferino or smoke,
Colors into which a sunset will collapse
On a high branch of broken promises.
Or they nail the late summer’s shingles of noon
Back onto the horizon’s overlap, reflecting
An emptiness visible on leaves that come and go.

How does a life flash before one’s eyes
At the end? How is there time for so much time?
You pick up the book and hold it, knowing
Long since the failed romance, the strained
Marriage, the messenger, the mistake,
Knowing it all at once, as if looking through
A lighted dormer on the dark crest of a barn.
You know who is inside, and who has always been
At the other edge of the wood. She is waiting
For no one in particular. It could be you.
If you can discover which tree she has become,
You will know whether it has all been true.

for Wolf Kahn

by J. D. McClatchy
Courtesy poets.org

Two Snails Set Off • National Poetry Month

Two Snails Set Off

The video  is based on the French poem “Song of the Snails Who Went to Burial” written by Jacques Prévert, and features some very well-known French performers.

Two Snails Set Off from Romain Segaud on Vimeo.

God Letter • National Poetry Month

God Letter


Everybody is doing trigger warnings now, so
To Whom It May Concern, I hated God
when my sister died. I didn’t know it was
coming, but we were at the hospital in a private
room for family, and our pastor
was there, the one who baptized me, and
he said Let us pray, and I kept my eyes
open to watch everybody, but
listened, and when he said Sometimes
God has to take back his angels,
I was smart enough to know, I was 14, that
he was saying she was gone or going
and I loathed him so much, he didn’t see
the look on my face, that blazing anger
blank heart f-you-forever look, but then
my parents told us we were going to
take her off life support, and I died then,
and after they took away the machines we had
solitude, family time the five of us, mom,
dad, me, my brother, and my sister. Holding her
body she was warm she wasn’t conscious
but she could hear us I know it, then they
opened the door for other family to
say goodbye and I was hugging her back
in her bed, my face against her face, my tears
wetting her cheek it was flush and her wavy
hair, I wanted to hold her forever I was
hurting but felt selfish like other people
wanted to say goodbye too so I let go,
and her head kind of tilted to the side and
I straightened it so I was a mess then
goodbye goodbye we left there to clean
the house for mourners to come.


by CM Burroughs
Courtesy poets.org

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party • National Poetry Month

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party



In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.

In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,

you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him

about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be
enjoyable. Please RSVP.

They RSVP. They come.
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend

the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going?

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair 

of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars
is watching from the outside. 

My boyfriend responds in his chipper way.
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,

isn’t it? My mother smiles her best
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend

Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing
a Little Better Smile.

Everyone eats soup.
Then, my mother turns

to me, whispers in Mandarin, Is he coming with you
for Thanksgiving? My good friend is & she wouldn’t like

this. I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling
on the string that makes my cardboard mother

more motherly, except she is
not cardboard, she is

already, exceedingly my mother. Waiting
for my answer.

While my father opens up
a Boston Globe, when the invitation

clearly stated: No security
blankets. I’m like the kid

in Home Alone, except the home
is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone,

& not the one who needs
to learn, has to—Remind me

what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says
to my mother, as though they have always, easily

talked. As though no one has told him
many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets

slasher flick meets psychological
pit he is now co-starring in.

Remind me, he says
to our family.

  
by Chen Chen
Courtesy poets.org

Stopping the clock • National Poetry Month

Stopping the clock


I didn’t think the pendulum
was so heavy and cold. It wants to 
finish its arc, but I hold on and 
it clunks against the oak
cabinet. The weights are low, but there 
is no need for two fluid pulls
to bring them to the top. The small 
black cat sniffs at the still
metal. Wrinkling his nose at
the cabinet’s musty smell, he does 
not linger as I buff
my fingerprints from the brass 
with my shirtsleeve. The pendulum 
knocks against the back as I latch
the door. I stand up, press my forehead 
against the cool glass, closing my eyes 
against the fading hand-painted numbers. 
I know what time it is.

by Chris Fow Cohen
Shared with the author's permission