I’m not going to lie, but “cultivating my garden,” why I started this blog not coincidentally on January 20 of this year, is not easy right now. However, I am going to try in April with it being National Poetry Month and the month of my wife Kim’s 55th birthday – and also sadly the month of her mother and best friend passing away four years ago. With two of the three, I have things planned, really only sort of with the second, and the third one is really up to Kim with however she wants to remember them.

For National Poetry Month, as mentioned in my last blog post, I will be sharing poems each day: first, mine from years ago, and then a link to another poem from one of three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day. I subscribed to the three sites earlier this week in anticipation of National Poetry Month. For my wife’s birthday, which is next Sunday, we both are off next weekend and whatever we do, or don’t do, we’ll be together. As of now, we have no fixed plans.

Also I’m going to try to write a poem or, maybe to be more accurate, to start a poem each day during April. I had a couple of poetry classes in college including an independent study during my senior year of college in the early 90s where the goal was to write poetry and get some poems published in literary journals, a very few of which I did. In the early to mid 2000s, I returned to writing poetry and even had a poetry reading at a now-defunct cultural society in suburban Philadelphia. That is where about half of the poems I’ll be sharing this coming month will be coming from.

It only seems apropos that I leave you with a poem or two. I thought I’d start small with two of my favorite short poems:

The title of this post comes from a line by Satine to Christian in the 2001 Baz Luhrmann movie Moulin Rouge that for some reason I think of when I think of talking about poetry: “Ah, poetry. Yes, this it what I want naughty words.”