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.

Today’s poem from me is another I read during my poetry reading in 2004. Here is the poem with the introduction I read to it:

Usually I try to write free flowing poems, not too structured, but this was one of those rare poems I tightened up the structure. I think I used a poetry exercise in an edition of Writer’s Digest. It was one of my first attempts at trying something like this. The phrase “Sauve qui piet” means “Let him who save himself can.” The poem is best read in desktop and sometimes lansdcape on your browser of choice.

Shadows In The Pine Grove

Shadows in the pine grove are great hulking beasts,
my best friend Ed told me and I believed him, because
needles crackled there as if beneath some great weight.
Bloodhounds would track their scent to this very edge,
I could go no further. Sauve qui piet, my motto.

Shadows in the pine grove are great hulking beasts,
my best friend Ed told me and I never believed him really
until the day his mother warned us not to play inside it
lest their horns gore us, hooves trample us to death.
And even then, I did not believe. But that summer

shadows in the pine grove were great hulking beasts
in Laddsburg, Pennsylvania. Larry Epler confirmed this
when he pulled one dead from Ed's wooded backyard,
and set it to spin on a spit for the whole community 
to sample. The red tenderloins of imagination,

shadows in the pine grove once greet hulking beasts,
we savored the same way a train whistle first whispered
across the plains, slowly echoing the frontier's demise.
It went down hard, arrowhead scraping against my larynx.
I only could choke out vowels: ay-yeeee.

Shadows in the pine grove are great hulking beasts,
a boy named Ed told a boy named Byron, who believes it
even now. As sure as thunder is Thor, lightning, Zeus,
they are there, the shape of the wind we can't make out,
herds still roaming inside our primeval skulls.

I have no other poem from another website to share today. Nothing “spoke” to me.