poetry is life distilled

It's national poetry month! 

This is an excuse for me to spend more time reading and writing poetry. I used to be in love with the rhythm and flow, but then life took over and I haven't read poetry for a few years. Every once in a while I write some though... typically when I'm sad and can't find any other way to release my feelings. My friend Diana has a great love and appreciation for poetry and has recently sent me a few she thought I would like, which has rekindled my love for poetry.

Throughout the years I've kept many books with page after page of scribbled poems, some rhyming, some haiku, some one long continuous run on sentence that couldn't end until I had emptied the contents of my soul onto the paper. In a brief moment of moving-induced-insanity, I threw away all of my books into a dumpster behind an apartment that I lived in almost 5 years ago. I have no idea what I was thinking, except that I probably wanted to throw as much away as possible to reduce the amount of stuff I had to pack and unpack in my new place. Not much I can do about it now, but I often wonder what I wrote in those books and what feelings reading words from my youth would evoke.

Now I have a pretty pink spiral book that I purchased in 2009. I don't write often but it is about 1/3 full of poems, musings, and selected quotes. Today I'll share with you the first and last entries of this book...

The first...
a collection of rocks
perched upon my kitchen window sill
reminds me of sunshine
to love the earth
from which each piece was born
and eventually broke free from

and the last...
The highlight of my day
was eating a perfect peach
so juicy and
sweet
that I stood over the
garbage can
while I ate it
watching drops of juice
falling from my chin
be absorbed
by a discarded paper towel
I enjoyed this so
much
that when I finished
I ate another.
9-8-10

I'll try to find a great poem to post each day this month.... but for now I have to go study for my business math exam that I have to take at 1:30 today. Hope you all enjoy this lovely sunny (at least in OK) day...