April is Poetry Appreciation Month

 

Poetry comes in formats other than books or magazines.

 

Amanda Laughtland offers a delightful website with poems and her postcards and zines. http://teenytiny.org  She prints tiny books folded and sliced from a single standard sheet of computer paper that present the reader with a cover and 7 pages. Her following poem would fit perfectly on one of those pages.

On an Errand

I found the cupboard far from bare

but lacking important ingredients

for banana muffins: wheat flour

and baking powder. So I drove

to the grocery store, pausing twice

at four-way stops and once more

to look (no cars were behind me)

at the tidy row of crocuses,

purple and white, beside the cemetery.

 

A postcard serves as a tiny frame for a personal note of appreciation. In the days of email we have forgotten this now unique method of communication.

 

 

Ted Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa and sold life insurance in Nebraska for Lincoln Benefit Life Company. He has published a book called Winter Morning Walks which consists entirely of poems he wrote to fit on 100 postcards for his friend, poet Jim Harrison (post of April 6). Clear, delightful observations of nature as the poet sees it.  

Snow melting from the roof.

Spring, the sky rippled with geese,

but the green comes on slowly,
timed to the ticking of downspouts.
The pond, still numb from months
of ice, reflects just one enthusiastic
this morning, a budding maple
whose every twig is strung with beads
of carved cinnabar, bittersweet red.