And So It's April

Some years back this time of year was designated National Poetry Month. It's fitting that April, such a lovely name, might have come from that of Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, as far as the Greeks were concerned, in ancient times. Breeding, as it does, lilacs out of the cold, dead land, T. S. (Thos. Stearns) Eliot called April "the cruelest month" in his poem The Waste Land (1922, the year my dad was born). This very day, marks the anniversaries of the births of "Iron Chancellor,"Otto von Bismark (1815) that wily Prussian statesman; and musician Sergei Rachmaninoff, born in czarist Russia, 1873. But for me, for now, it's the first day of Nat'l Poetry Month, a time for rhyme.

When daffodils blossom and robins hop

And forsythia punctuate the yard,

All chrome-y yellow and car radios be-bop,

From drivers' windows, every bard

Thinks of the word that rhymes with Sing

And you know it's well and truly Spring.