Welcome to National Poetry Month 2023!

Context for Today’s Poem, “April Foolish: Overnight”: Here in my hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, March departed like a wet and roaring lion–rain, thunder, lightening, high wind–and April entered the same way but that few degrees colder needed to translate a rainstorm into a full-scale blizzard. We had about an inch of new snow every hour for a while there, embellished with continuing lightening flashes and driven by gale-force winds.

I am sure that I am not the only one to feel that Nature is pranking us here, covering newly emerged buds and ground-cover with more than six inches of new snow, especially with temperatures rising past the melting point predicted for today and even higher in the days ahead.

Note: If you are not yet signed up to receive my poem each day in April, but would like to do that, please let me know!

Spotlight on the Academy of American Poets:

It probably comes as no surprise that I am a card-carrying member of the Academy of American Poets. (You can be too! Just elect to pay annual dues and reap a host of benefits including a celebratory poster in April.) In case you don’t know, through their website, poets.org, they are big sponsors of National Poetry Month, a celebration now in its twenty-seventh year, and they offered a free, curated “Poem-a-Day” email to anyone who wishes to receive it.

They offer many other free resources, too, for readers, teachers, and poets alike, including a terrific data base of poems (searchable theme, occasion, form, or poet’s name) and more than 3,000 biographies of classic and contemporary poets.

Happy April! Here’s to finding out what we are meant for!

LESLIE