Here it is National Poetry Month. In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, it’s also “the cruelest month,” perhaps as a jab at an early luminary in English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, who found it a kinder, more life-giving calendar moment in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. So, what’s happening today?
In the hemisphere where I live and work, people traditionally try to get outside after the heaviness of winter lifts. Snowmen have mostly melted to reveal the greening ground. Some of the news outside is still not pretty, though. You may need what Wallace Stevens called "a mind of winter," in The Snow Man, to process the following items. I wish you well in your thinking as you ponder these outdoor moments.
1) There is so much nuclear-contaminated water at the Fukishima plant that storage space has become a huge issue. Read about how a barge, currently serving as an offshore leisure park, will store some of it.
2) The Persimmon Place Townhouse Community in Edgewater Florida is seeking to prohibit children from playing outside or in driveways. Games like “tag” will be forbidden because there are no playgrounds and the community surrounds a parking lot. This could be the last gasp for the skateboard and Spaldeens.
Childhood. Spring. Nuclear winter.
The womb may be the only safe place for people. No wonder it is being hijacked by politicians.
Read a poem today. Here’s a link to “[in Just-],” by e. e. cummings:
You can read the title whichever way you prefer. I think he wanted to have it both ways.
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