For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.

Mice was a theme to which I kept returning, as I noted first on Thursday, and I returned to it also in this poem. At the time I wrote this, I was reading a book by the contemporary American poet Robert Bly called “Morning Poems,” and so entitled it simply enough: 

Morning Poem 

--- for Bob and Wallace

It's the mouse in a bag rustling
that awakens me to this thought, 
this thought of being unclean
that makes me take an early ablution

this morning. I think how
often it's the little things waken me,
stir my soul, the larger concepts don't
keep me up at night as much

as they have become a part of me.
I am breathing, in and out.
The soul is a vampire sucking my blood,
I think I am drained.

I must get back to sleep,
a time when thoughts would not come
as quick, as furious as they do
now, like a mouse in a bag rustling.

Today’s poem from one of three sites that share a poem each day is “For Allen Ginsburg” by Dorothea Grossman on The Poetry Foundation website.