Happy National Poetry Month 2016!

Hey, everyone, it's...

You can grab that logo there, and find tons of cool ideas for celebrating poetry, on the Academy of American Poets website. Memorize a poem! Create your own anthology on Poets.org! Watch a poetry movie! Most of all (sez me), get involved in local poetry events in your community. I've been a member of our local, relatively new Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and we are holding our third annual benefit gala this month on the 17th, along with our usual monthly poetry reading/open mic on the second Tuesday.

In honor of National Poetry Month, one of my favorite poems:

The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?