Reruns: May Posts Worth Revisiting

May is National Bike Month, which may be why some years I didn't do a lot of writing. I did write more posts than I'm listing here but they're often specific to an event so they don't hold up over time. In 2018 I did some bike travel so you get the start of the trip here, the rest in June. 

A name-change note: I went to work for the Bicycle Alliance of Washington in 2012, then led the organization through a name change to Washington Bikes in 2013-2014. I've left the two names in my archive links for historical accuracy and the bit of nostalgia.

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A Year of Poems: May

If April is the cruellest month, May is sunshine and spring, hope and flowers, and quite often the subject of a poet's celebratory observations. 

Here's my problem with poems about May: They're so often sappy. Flowers and birds in rhyming couplets. Don't get me wrong, I love flowers and birds and I'm not against the occasional rhyming couplet but it gets repetitious. I skipped over a lot of May poems that were a little too hop-te-skippety for my taste. And so, so many are named "May". So many. 

You're getting some birds and flowers and spring. I also had to include  "May 1968" by Sharon Olds, which isn't about the month at all but about events in May, and "May 1972" by James Schuyler, which is as timely now as it was when he wrote it.

"May and the Poets" by James Henry Leigh Hunt

May's in all the Italian books:—
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves,

"May Day" by Sara Teasdale

For how can I be sure
  I shall see again
The world on the first of May
  Shining after the rain?

"In the Month of May" by Robert Bly

In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things
lean on each other, how the bees work,
the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.

"May" by Jonathan Galassi

Ivy from last summer clogs the pool,
brewing a loamy, wormy, tea-leaf mulch
soft to the touch

and rank with interface of rut and rot.
The month after the month they say is cruel
is and is not.

"May Day" by Tess Taylor

white lilacs curdle in pre-summer heat.
The parade I barely noticed was beginning
is already halfway down the street.

"May to April" by Philip Frenau

Without your showers, I breed no flowers,
    Each field a barren waste appears;
If you don't weep, my blossoms sleep,
    They take such pleasures in your tears.

As your decay made room for May,
    So I must part with all that’s mine:
My balmy breeze, my blooming trees
    To torrid suns their sweets resign!

"Under the Willows [May is a pious fraud of the almanac]" by James Russell Lowell

May is a pious fraud of the almanac,
A ghastly parody of real Spring
Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind;
Or if, o'er-confident, she trust the date,
And, with her handful of anemones,
Herself as shivery, steal into the sun,
The season need but turn his hourglass round,

"Song on May Morning" by John Milton

Now the bright morning Star, Dayes harbinger,
  Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
  The Flowry May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow Cowslip, and the pale Primrose.

"The Month of May" by Wendy Cope

So carpe diem, gather buds, make hay.
The world is glorious. Compare, contrast
December with the merry month of May.
Now is the time, now is the time to play.

"For a Day in May" by Ruth Earnshaw

Shadow of white lilac
cast by May moonlight,
fettering me, dancing 
in the dew-cold grass
never let me go.

"To this May" by W.S. Merwin

it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time

"May" by Kerry Hardie

All hardship, hunger, treachery of winter forgotten.
This unfounded conviction: forgiveness, hope.

"May 1968" by Sharon Olds

When the Dean said we could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,
we lay down, in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
over us.

"May 1972" by James Schuyler

Soft May mists are here again.
There, the war goes on.
Beside the privet the creamy
white tulips are extra
fine this year. There,
foliage curls blackened back:

A Year of Poems

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Earth Day Poems for Every Day


Photo graphic created wit a program. Foreground, a hand holding the bottom half of the globe, a large green tree growing out of it. Top text "Go green before green goes". Bottom text "World Earth Day". Background soft focus earth and grass.


Every day really is Earth Day. What else could it be? Knowing that, how will you choose to live?

As with all my collections of poetry I've chosen a few lines to excerpt, not necessarily the first lines in the poem. Follow the links to read the full work.

"Earth Day" by Jane Yolen

As long as life,
As dear, as free,
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me. 

"Make the Earth Your Companion" by J. Patrick Lewis

Make the Earth your companion.
Walk lightly on it, as other creatures do.

"Gravity" by Donna Hilbert

This is why we call the earth Mother,
why all rising is a miracle.

"Treat Each Bear" by Gary Lawless

Treat each bear as the last bear.
Each wolf the last, each caribou.
Each track the last track.

"School Prayer" by Diane Ackerman

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,

"For All" by Gary Snyder

I pledge allegiance to the soil
            of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
             one ecosystem
             in diversity
             under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

"Love in a Time of Climate Change" by Craig Santos Perez

I love you as one loves the most vulnerable
species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

"Beginners" by Denise Levertov

-- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

"Untitled [Earth teach me stillness]" by Nancy Wood

Earth teach me caring
    as the mother who secures her young.
Earth teach me courage
    as the tree which stands all alone.

"When the Animals" by Gary Lawless

When the plants speak to us
     in their delicate, beautiful language,
     will we be able to answer them?

"2007, VI [It is hard to have hope]" by Wendell Berry

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
place that you belong to though it is not yours,
for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.

"Map" by Linda Hogan

This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.

"Anthropocene: A Dictionary" by Jake Skeets

diyóół        : wind (

                         wind (more of it) more wind as in (to come up)
                         plastic bags driftwood the fence line 

"Makers" by Pamela Alexander 

We dried rivers or dammed them, made
music, treaties, money, promises.
Made more and more of our kind,
which made the cars and the wars
necessary, the droughts and hurricanes.

"Nimbawaadaan Akiing / I Dream a World" by Margaret Noodin

Nimbawaadaan akiing
I dream a world

atemagag biinaagami
of clean water

gete-mitigoog
ancient trees

gaye gwekaanimad
and changing winds.

"Dead Stars" by Ada Limón

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
                 if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

"Mending Mittens" by Larry Schug

Blessed be those who have laced together
the splits at the seams of this world,
repaired its threads of twisted waters.
Blessed be those who stitch together
the animals and the land,
repair the rends in the fabric
of wolf and forest,
of whale and ocean,
of condor and sky.
Blessed be those who are forever fixing
the tear between people and the rest of life

"Testimony" by Rebecca Baggett

I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
"a great and common tenderness,"
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.
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Reruns: April Posts Worth Revisiting

I'll note that since April is the month people try to complete 30 Days of Biking, I've written a lot of posts in this particular month—in 2014 I committed to a format of 30 rides, 30 words, 30 pictures. I've included examples from 2019 as well as 2014 that wrap up the month and link to all the posts that month; regular blogging to hold myself accountable keeps me on track. Many of them are specific to a time and place so they're not quite as evergreen as the ones I'm sharing here.

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