Mac says today is Poetry on your Blog Day. (Who decides these things, anyway? Is there a committee? Are memos sent out?)

Whatever, I'm in. Can't have too much poetry in the world. Being I am still totally savoring Julia Alvarez' new collection The Woman I Kept to Myself that I posted about on April 8. I shall direct you there. It is soooooo good.

But for those lazy bloggers who don't want to leave the page they're on, here is another gem:

LOCUST

Happiness surprised me in middle age:
just in the nick of forty I found love,
a steady job, a publisher, a home,
ten acres and a sky-reflecting pond--
a better ending than I'd expected.
We built our own house on a bare hillside
and started planting trees: elm, maple, oak.
Under my second-story writing room
(which was all windows on the southeast side)
we put locusts for their "instant shade."

By our third anniversary those trees
were grown so tall, it was like climbing up
into a tree house when I went to work,
pulling the mind's ladder up behind me
from the absorbing life I was living.
I tried to focus but those branches filled
with songbirds busy at their nest building,
squirrels scampering to the very edges
of blossoming branches buzzing with bees.
How could I write with all this activity?

It took some getting used to but, of course,
life feeds life. Where'd I get the idea
that art and happiness could never jive?
I felt stupid, wasting so many years.
But I took solace from those locust trees,
known for their crooked, seemingly aimless growth.
We have to live our natures out, the seed
we call our soul unfolds over the course
of a lifetime and there's no going back
on who we are--that much I've learned from trees.

Julia Alvarez, The Woman I Kept to Myself

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