Starting Above the Arctic Circle

Welcome to National Poetry Month! In April, I will share a poem a day with you on this site. The only way this could be better is if April had 39 days!

Don't hesitate to share with me some poems you come across and think are cool. If you hear one or read me or even just think about that one you had to memorize, send it along. I'll share it with the rest of the class!

So, here's our first poem of the month. Enjoy, and check back tomorrow for another one!


The Icelandic Language

In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.

In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.

But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

In this language, you can't chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can't
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.

Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

by Bill Holm

Getting Ready for National Poetry Month

Like a marathon, you shouldn't just dash into National Poetry Month. What you should do is train a little, read poetry from time to time.

Check out Borders Open-Door Poetry — very interesting, with contemporary poets reading their work and responding to important, silly and interesting questions.

And check out this great poem by the late Bill Holm, whose poetry I was introduced to in the fabulous book The Geography of Bliss. I'll share another of his poems, soon, but for now, enjoy this one.


Wedding Poem For Schele and Phil

A marriage is a risky business these days
Says some old and prudent voice inside.
We don’t need twenty children anymore
To keep the family line alive,
Or gather up the hay before the rain.
No law demands respectability.
Love can arrive without certificate or cash.
History and experience both make clear
That men and women do not hear
The music of the world in the same key,
Rather rolling dissonances doomed to clash.

So what is left to justify a marriage?
Maybe only the hunch that half the world
Will ever be present in any room
With just a single pair of eyes to see it.
Whatever is invisible to one
Is to the other an enormous golden lion
Calm and sleeping in the easy chair.
After many years, if things go right
Both lion and emptiness are always there;
The one never true without the other.

But the dark secret of the ones long married,
A pleasure never mentioned to the young,
Is the sweet heat made from two bodies in a bed
Curled together on a winter night,
The smell of the other always in the quilt,
The hand set quietly on the other’s flank
That carries news from another world
Light-years away from the one inside
That you always thought you inhabited alone.
The heat in that hand could melt a stone.

by Bill Holm