We’re 10 days into National Poetry Month and I’ve not made one mention of it. That’s a damn shame!

I never paid much attention to poets as I’ve alluded to before. Then, Mark was killed and I wanted to know more about why he was attracted to poetry and certain kinds of poets.

Someone wrote me that he thought poetry was “a thing” and maybe I should glom onto that. He didn’t think much of my “diary of grief” style.

I’m not a poet and never will be.

Did you know Herman Melville wrote more poetry than fiction? I didn’t until this afternoon when, after spending most of the day on my writing-for-hire, I employed my speed-reading prowess I first learned back in the day at LHS, from Mr. Barton. I managed to tear through three books on Melville, Ambrose Bierce, and Walt Whitman.

Melville was a poet: “Melville His World and Work,” by Andrew Delbanco

Melville’s first poetic theme was the Civil War, which unfolded in Battle-Pieces and Other Aspects of the War. “If we are to completely to understand Melville’s poetry,” wrote Robert Penn Warren, “we must see it against the backdrop of his defeat as a writer.” [from Andrew Delbanco’s, Melville: His World and Work]

If you know anything about Melville and his writing, then you know his popularity as a writer came long after he was gone.

I thought today’s poem-a-day, “Solemnity,” fit well with the Melville’s Civil War poems and the reading I’ve been doing from Drew Gilpin Faust’s excellent, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

Solemnity

At the mosque’s entrance      3:30 a.m.     Syrian
women beg wearing black gloves.
Your father’s grandmother was Syrian

before the country was ash. 
Before the government turned 
to kill its people.

What incites that internal blaze?
What says       it is me I will take
or not me      but those whom I claim?

We are claimed after meditation. 
We are walking an empty street 
after pretending to play drums.

After I recognize the heather in air
after we swim in a pool surrounded by azaleas
after your mother smiles observing us

after we sleep in her house       fields
of sunflowers. I’m on a bus
watching them sway.     I’m forgetting

the distance       the inevitable loss
I will hold warm as snow whitens the green. 
What will you hold?

What will you see beyond your hands?
Streets lined with jacarandas
that morph to pines     to a self beneath

ice that wolves trample silently? 
Someone still begs.
Someone still believes in our

innate generosity.
You are waiting for me but refuse to say it.
You believe in returns.

You believe in the planet’s roundness.
You believe in gravity’s inaudible assurance.
You believe in what I doubt.