In April of 2000 we celebrated National Poetry Month by posting poems every day. Here's the complete archives.

Below are some of Lori's favorites.

Click here to read poems written by friends of the duchy.

April 1

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

- William Carlos Williams

April 2

TOPOGRAPHY


After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

- SHARON OLDS from The Gold Cell 1993

April 3

WILDERNESS


There is a wolf in me... fangs pointed for tearing gashes
  ...a red tongue for raw meat... and the hot lapping
  of blood - i keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it
  to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me....a silver gray fox.... I sniff and
  guess... I pick things out of the wind and air... I
  nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and
  hide the feathers...I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me....a snout and a belly.... a machinery
  for eating and grunting.... a machinery for sleeping
  satisfied in the sun - I got this too from the wilderness and
  the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me.... I know I came from the salt-blue water-gates
  .....I scurried with shoals of herring... I blew waterspouts with
  porpoises... before land was.. before the water went down.....
  before Noah.... before the first chapter of Genesis

There is a baboon in me....clambering-clawed... dog-faced.....yawping
  a galoot’s hunger...hairy under the armpits.....here are the hawk-eyed
  hankering men....here are the blonde and blue-eyed women.... here they hide
  curled asleep waiting.... ready to snarl and kill.... ready to sing and give milk....
  waiting - I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird....and the eagle flies among the
  Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of
  what I want.... and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon
  before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas
  of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes -
  And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my
  red-valve heart - and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a
  woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-
  Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where - For I am the keeper
  of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal
  of the world: I came from the wilderness.

- Carl Sandberg

April 4

WELCOME TO HOLLAND

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child
with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that
unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel.
It’s like this...

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning
a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy.
You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your
wonderful plans. The Coliseum, Michaelangelo’s David, the gondolas in
Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives.
You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands.
The stewardess comes in and says,
“Welcome to Holland”.

“Holland” you say. “What do you mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy?
I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve
landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible,
disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease.
It’s a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must
learn a whole new language and you will meet a whole group
of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy,
less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a
while and you catch your breath, you look around,
and you begin to notice that Holland has Windmills,
Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from
Italy, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there.
And for the rest of your life you will say “yes, that’s where I was supposed
to go. That’s what I had planned”.

The pain of that will never, ever, go away
because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy,
you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely
things about Holland.

- Lori Rothman

April 5

A KNOCK AT THE DOOR


"Who's there?"
   "I'm old age,
     I've come to see you."
"Later!
   I'm busy.
     I've things to do!"
I wrote.
   Telephoned.
     Demolished a fried egg.
Then I opened the door,
     but found no one there.
Maybe friends were pulling my leg?
Or perhaps I hadn't heard the name right.
It wasn't old age,
     but maturity, had called.
It couldn't wait,
   sighed,
     and departed.

- Yevgeny Yevtushenko 1965

April 6

In Praise of My Sister (1976)

My sister doesn't write poems,
and it's unlikely she'll suddenly start writing poems,
She takes afer her mother, who didn't write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn't write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister's roof:
my sister's husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.

My sister's desk drawers don't hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn't hold new ones.
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn't want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn't spilll on manuscripts.

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success,
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she get back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.

- Szymborska (Polish woman, winner of the Nobel Prize)

April 7

THE VOICES

It’s okay for the rich and the lucky to keep still,
Noone wants to know about them anyway.
But those in need have to step forward,
have to say: I am blind,
or: I’m about to go blind,
or: nothing is going well with me,
or: I have a child here who’s sick,
or: right there I’m sort of glued together...

And probably that doesn’t do anything either.

They have to sing, if they didn’t sing, everyone
would walk past, as if they were fences or trees.

That’s where you can hear good singing.

People really are strange: they prefer
to hear castratos in boychoirs.

But god himself comes and stays a long time
when the world of half-people start to bore him.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

April 8

EGO TRIPPING                there may be a reason why

i was born in the congo
i walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx
i designed a pyramid so tough that a star
    that only glows every one hundred years
    falls into the center giving divine perfect light
i am bad


i sat on the throne drinking nectar with allah
i got hot and sent an ice age to europe to cool my thirst
my oldest daughter is nefertiti
    the tears from my birth pains created the nile
i am a beautiful woman


i gazed on the forest and burned out the sahara desert
with a packet of goats meat and a change of clothes
i crossed it in two hours
i am a gazelle so swift, so swift you can't catch me

    For a birthday present when he was three
i gave my son hannibal an elephant
    he gave me rome for mothers day
my strength flows ever on

my son noah built new / ark and
i stood proudly a the helm
    as we sailed on a soft summer day
i turned myself into myself and was        jesus   

   
    men intone my loving name
    All praises, All praises
i am the one who would save


i sowed diamonds in my back yard
my bowels deliver uranium
    the filings from my fingernails are semi-precious jewels
    on a trip north
i caught cold and blew my nose giving oil to the Arab world
i am so hip that even my errors are correct
i sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as i went
    the hair from my head thinned and gold was laid across three continents


i am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
i cannot be comprehended
except by my permission
i mean... i.....can fly
    like a bird in the sky......

- NIKKI GIOVANI

April 9

NARCISSUS

Narcissus.
Your fragrance.
And the depth of the stream.

I would reamin at your verge.
Flower of love.
Narcissus.

Over your white eyes flicker
shadows and sleeping fish.
Birds and butterflies
lacquer mine.

You so minute and I so tall.
Flower of love.
Narcissus.

How active the frogs are!
They will not leave alone
the glass which mirrors
your delirium and mine.

Narcissus.
My sorrow.
And my sorrow's self.

- Federico Garcia Lorca 1955 (translated by William Jay Smith)

April 10

SMELLING THE WIND

Rushing headlong
into new silence
your face
dips on my horizon
the name
one sweet season
to cast off
on another voyage

No reckoning allowed
save the marvelous arithmetics
of distance

- Audre Lorde, from "The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance" copyright 1993

April 11

ONE NIGHT I BURNED THE HOUSE I LOVED

One night i burned the house I loved,
It lit a perfect ring
In which I saw some weeds and stone
Beyond - not anything.

Certain creatures of the air
Frightened by the night,
They came to see the world again
And perished in the light.

Now I sail from sky to sky
And all the blackness sings
Against the boat that I have made
Of mutilated wings.

- Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956 - 1968

April 12

Forty Years

for forty years
the sheets of white paper have
passed under my hands and I have tried
    to improve their peaceful

emptiness putting down
little curls little shafts
of letters words
    little flames leaping

not one page
was less to me than fascinating
discursive full of cadence
    its pale nerves hiding

in the curves of the Qs
behind the soldierly Hs
in the webbed feet of the Ws
    forty years

and again this morning as always
I am stopped as the world comes back
wet and beautiful I am thinking
    briskly modestly

from day to day from one
golden page to another.

- Mary Oliver, from west wind, Poems and Prose Poems

April 13

ABSENCE

Every night I scan
the heavens with my eyes
seeking the star
that you are contemplating.

I question travellers
fromt he four corners of the earth
hoping to meet one
who has breathed your fragrance.

When the wind blows
I make sure it blows in my face:
the breeze might bring me
news of you.

I wander over roads without aim, without purpose.
Perhaps a song
will sound your name.

Secretly I study
every face I see
hoping against hope
to glimpse a trace of your beauty.

- Abu Bakr al-Turtushi (1059 - 1126)

April 14

LETTER TO CALIFORNIA

I am in the north, in the hills of rain;
The grass grows here with a core of frost.
Write to me of our hills burned with summer,
Of a brown hawk sleeping on a baked fence-post.

Say whether our hills simmer under the sun,
Whether through our valleys a wind runs
Straight form the sea, stirring the wild grain,
Rippling the dark brass and the pale bronze.

Far fields are greenest by too far.
Write to me of the country at your hand,
The brown field and the brown hill-side
With the scrub oak's shadow like a brand
And a blaze of granite high beyond the hill.
I am thirsty for that dry land.

- Marie de L. Welch

April 15

XIV
Every Day You Play

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among
    the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you
    existed.

Suddenly, the wind howls and bangs at my shut
    window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
the rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last
    night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through
    your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your
    mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to
    me.
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them
    all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn,
    kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning
    fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl
    of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains,
    bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry
    trees.

- Pablo Neruda from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

April 16

A FEW SIRENS

Today I am at home
writing poems.
My life goes well:
only a few sirens herald disaster
in the ghetto
down the street.
In the world, people die
of hunger.
On my block we lose
jobs, housing and breasts.
But in the world
children are lost;
whole countries of children
starved to death
before the age
of five
each year;
their mothers squatted
in the filth
around the empty cooking pot
wondering:

But I cannot pretend
to know
what they wonder.
A walled horror
instead of thought
would be my mind.
And our children
gladly starve themselves.

Thiking of the food I eat
every day
I want to vomit, like
people who throw up
at will,
understanding that whether
they digest or not
they must consume.

Can you imagine?

Rather than let the hungry
inside the resturants
Let them eat vomit, you say.
They are applauded
for this.
They are light.

But
wasn't there a time
when food was sacred?

When a dead child
starved naked
among the marketplace
spoiled
the appetite?

- Alice Walker from Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful

April 17

Seeing You Carry Plants In

How much I love you. The night is moist.
The air is still, as when I love you.
It is not every evening that I love you.
I come back like the stars, sometimes out of clouds.

The night is moist, and nourishing as your mind
that lets everything around you live.
I saw you carry the plants inside tonight
over the grass, to save them from cold.

Sometimes, I slip behind a door, so that
I will not be called on, or walk
hunched on sandbars below earth, not sure
if anyone in my family can love.

Your voice is water open beneath stars,
collected from abundant rain, gone to low places.
The night is moist, the ground wet,
air still, trees silent, and tonight I love you.

- Robert Bly from Loving a Woman in Two Worlds

April 18

Hummingbird

Liquid energy lighting
on frantic red -
Summer fades against
your iridescent green,
your tiny blue heart
the center of flame
melting flowers.
You burn straight and true
even as you flicker
unpredictable as love.
How long do you live?
And do you change
from old to young
and back again
as you hover against
the sky, and vanish
in the thicket of leaves
that hides your
whispering nest?

- Cynthia Anderson from Shared Sightings - an anthology of bird poems

April 19

DAYBREAK

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity they sank down
into it and lay still; and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

- Galway Kinnell from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words

April 20

THE KINGFISHER

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world - so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesnt have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water - hunger is the only story.
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

- Mary Oliver from House of Light

April 21

WHEN HE PRESSED HIS LIPS

When he pressed his lips to my mouth
the knot fell open of itself.
When he pressed them to my throat
the dress slipped to my feet.
So much I know -- but
when his lips touched my breast
everything, I swear,
down to his very name,
became so much confused
that I am still,
dear friends,
unable to recount
(as much as I would care to)
what delights
were next bestowed upon me
& by whom.

- Steve Kowit from Passionate Journey

April 22

QUESTION

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without the roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
How will I hide?

- May Swenson from The Complete Poems to Solve

April 23

TEACHING THE APE TO WRITE

They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair
then tied his pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"

- James Tate from Absences: New Poems

April 24

WITNESS

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

- Denise Levertov from Evening Train

April 25

Aftermath

Compelled by calamity's magnet
They loiter and stare as if the house
Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought
Some scandel might any minute ooze
>From a smoke-choked closet into light;
No deaths, no prodigious injuries
Glut these hunters after an old meat,
Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.

Mother Medea in a green smock
Moves humbly as any housewife through
Her ruined apartments, taking stock
Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:
Cheated of the pyre and the rack,
The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.

- by SYLVIA PLATH from The COLLOSSUS AND OTHER POEMS

April 26

      The Danger

Love seems easy in a circle of friends
but it's difficult, difficult.

Morning air through the window, the taste of it,
with every moment camel bells leaving the caravanserai.

This is how we wake, with winespills
on the prayer rug, and even the tavernmaster
is loading up. My life has gone
from willfullness to disrepute,
and I won't conceal, either, the joy
that led me out toward laughter.

Mountainous ocean, a moon hidden behind clouds,
the terror of being drawn under.

How can someone with a light shoulder-pack
walking the beach know how a night sea-journey is?

Hafiz! Stay in the dangerous life that's yours.
There you'll meet the face
that dissolves fear.

- KHWAJA SHAMSUDDIN MOHAMMED HAFIZ b. 1320  d.1389

April 27

How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn't care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.

- Emily Dickenson from Selected Poems of Emily Dickenson

April 28

THE NEED TO WIN

When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets -
He is out of his mind!

His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting -
And the need to win
Drains him of power.

- Chuang Tzu (3rd - 4th century B.C.) Translated from the Chinese by Thomas Merton

April 29

Some Signs and Symptoms of Inner Peace

A tendency to think and act spontaneously
rather than on fears based on past experiences
An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment
A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others
A loss of interest in conflict
A loss of the ability to worry
Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation
Contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature
Frequent attacks of smiling
An increased susceptibilty to the love extended by others,
as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it

- by Peace Pilgrim

April 30

A Quest for Cranes

Mercury finished writing the alphabet
when he saw cranes form letters in the sky.

The poet Ibycus was murdered at sea.
The murderers were found by cranes
that followed the ship.

In Chinese legend, dead souls ride
the crane's back to heaven. In Japan
a crane brings longevity and peace.

Zen Master: Why do you want to see a crane?
    To dance. To ride one's back to heaven.
How do you know they exist?
    One of our party heard them at night,
    trumpeting as they flew.
Maybe your friend was dreaming.
    Maybe everyone is.
Did you see a crane?
    No, we saw other things.
    An owl who lives underground.
    A light brighter than the sun.
    An eagle eating a crow.
But no cranes?
    We are not ready for cranes.

- by Sheila Golburgh Johnson from Shared Sightings, an anthology of bird poems

A JOURNEY

When he got up that morning everything was different:
He enjoyed the bright spring day
But he did not realize it exactly, he just enjoyed it.

And walking down the street to the railroad station
Past magnolia trees with dying flowers like old socks
It was a long time since he had breathed so simply.

Tears filled his eyes and it felt good
But he held back
Because men didn't walk around crying in that town.

Waiting on the platform at the station
The fear came over him of something terrible about to happen:
The train was late and he recited the alphabet to keep hold.

And in its time it came screeching in
And as it went on making its usual stops,
People coming and going, telephone poles passing,

He hid his head behind a newspaper
No longer able to hold back the sobs, and willed his eyes
To follow the rational weavings of the seat fabric.

He didn't do anything violent as he had imagines.
He cried for a long time, but when he finally quieted down
A place in him that had been closed like a fist was open,

And at the end of the ride he stood up and got off that train:
And through the streets and in all the places he lived in later on
He walked, himself at last, a man among men,
With such radiance that everyone looked up and wondered.

- by Edward Field