A Look Back at Poetry Month 2025
Want to make a Commonwealth crowd go “WOO!”? Remind them that “April is Poetry Month!”
Every year, throughout that cruellest month, students, teachers, and staff alike regale our community at morning recess with their favorite poems. Of course, they must start by saying “April is Poetry Month!” And we must respond with a “woo!” (No matter how many poems have already been shared on the pulse of this new day.)
Whether a crisp haiku or melodious mouthful, silly or serious, well known or brand new, each poem is a welcome interlude amongst our usual announcements and reminders. Enjoy a sampling of the pieces shared this year below.
“Reconciliation,” by Walt Whitman
Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be
utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly
wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world:
… For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw
near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffin.
“Summer,” by Chen Chen
You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.
Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel-size lint roller just in case.
Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.
Types of invisible pain stemming from adolescent disasters in classrooms, locker rooms, & quite often Toyota Camrys: at least 10,000.
You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.
Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”
Which really means “queer kids who could go online & learn that queer doesn’t have to mean disaster.”
Or dead.
Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.
& you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, & honeydew.
Your powers are great, are growing.
One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the breath.
The next day you will tell your father, You were wrong to say that I had to change.
To make me promise I would. To make me promise.
& promise.
"We Wear the Mask," by Paul Laurence Dunbar
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
"How to Be a Poet (i)," by Wendell Berry
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
"To the Rain," by Ursula K. Le Guin
Mother rain, manifold, measureless,
falling on fallow, on field and forest,
on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,
downwelling waters all-washing, wider
than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster
than countrysides, calming, recalling:
return to us, teaching our troubled
souls in your ceaseless descent
to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,
to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.
“A Poem About Hancock,” by Eric Davis P’89, ’90, ’08
My friends, life is an ever-changing cloud:
Things seem forever fixed, yet float away.
Hancock, dear to some of you, is one of these.
Once in New Hampshire, now in Maine,
it’s moving soon to Provincetown, they say.
Oh yes, a lot has changed since Merrill’s time.
You’ve heard about the barns on Merrill’s farm,
the hay kids slept in and the colds they caught,
but have you heard about the old race horse
kids used to ride to town, the ice-cream wars,
the bear hunts in the hills, the ring of fire
kids had to jump through when they skipped their jobs?
Those were the days, my friends! At Talent Night
a squad of goons dragged bad acts from the stage,
the fields caught fire, lightning struck the barn,
kids wrote whole novels in an afternoon.
Nobody went to bed. Food cooked itself.
Baseball was played on stilts; freshmen grew in size
while teachers motorcycled to and fro
talking of Michelangelo.
Why Hancock had to move I won’t say now.
We fought the locals off, I’ve heard.
The garbage pits gave up their dead.
The buses left at breakneck speed.
"This is a Channeled Text," by Alex Youngman
I don’t know if it would be scarier
To be abducted by aliens or
To be ignored, left alone to wonder
If there is an end to all this darkness,
There’s an answer to that question in the
Glowing light of a tractor beam, bathing
You in warmth, bringing you upwards to meet
Something, someone that isn’t just you, proof
That you can close cosmic emptiness, crawl
Your way through to some kind of connection,
Proof that love exists and proof that those guys
Who channel aliens are not lying,
But honestly it would be
Pretty horrifying.
“Jabberwocky,” by Lewis Carol
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Paul Revere’s Ride” (excerpt), by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm, —
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
“The Walrus and the Carpenter” (excerpt), by Lewis Carroll
"The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright —
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done —
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun."
“Sick,” by Shel Silverstein
"I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
"I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I've counted sixteen chicken pox
And there's one more—that's seventeen,
And don't you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut—my eyes are blue—
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I'm sure that my left leg is broke—
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button's caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained,
My 'pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is—what?
What's that? What's that you say?
You say today is. . .Saturday?
G'bye, I'm going out to play!”
“The Wall” (excerpt), by Forugh Farrokhzad
With the cold moments of the past fleeting by,
Your wild eyes contained in your silent demeanor
build a wall around me
And I flee from you to a pathless path.
Until I see valleys on the moons dirt
Until I wash my body in the water fountains of light
In a colorful fog of a warm summer morning
I’ll fill my skirt with lilies from the fields
And hear the roar of roosters from the village rooftops
I’m fleeing from you to the very skirts of the valley
Where I’ll press my feet to the ground
Until they sip dewdrops of grass
I’m fleeing from you to a deserted beach
Where on the lost boulders beneath dark clouds
I’ll learn the twisting dance of the ocean’s hurricane
In a far off sunset, like wild doves
I’ll see fields, mountains, and the sky beneath my feet.
And in the midst of dry bushes I’ll hear
the blissful music of field birds.
"Today," by Billy Collins
If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
“i thank You God for most this amazing,” by E. E. Cummings
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (excerpt), by W. H. Auden
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
“The Hunting Of The Snark” (excerpt), by Lewis Carroll
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
They shuddered to think that the chase might fail,
And the Beaver, excited at last,
Went bounding along on the tip of its tail,
For the daylight was nearly past.
"There is Thingumbob shouting!" the Bellman said,
"He is shouting like mad, only hark!
He is waving his hands, he is wagging his head,
He has certainly found a Snark!"
They gazed in delight, while the Butcher exclaimed
"He was always a desperate wag!"
They beheld him—their Baker—their hero unnamed—
On the top of a neighbouring crag,
Erect and sublime, for one moment of time,
In the next, that wild figure they saw
(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,
While they waited and listened in awe.
"It's a Snark!" was the sound that first came to their ears,
And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
Then the ominous words "It's a Boo—"
Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
A weary and wandering sigh
That sounded like "-jum!" but the others declare
It was only a breeze that went by.
They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
"Big Ideas," by Jonathan Aaron
As someone who has trouble thinking
about big ideas, I’ll occasionally
pick up a book of philosophy
in hopes of sharpening my so-called wits.
I don’t go in for helpful “commentaries”
designed to show the way for
readers like me. I only want to find
that single sentence lying at the heart
of the matter, the kernel
of kernels, the source of the light I lack.
But now, just as I start suspecting
I can see X’s concept of phenomenology
actually taking shape in the words I’ve been
staring at, its charm, its subtle glow,
I notice it’s raining, and the laundry
hung on the clothesline, and more
hammering down in the cellar, where
a team of experts is looking for what
they tell me I’m a lot better off
not knowing anything about.
"I wonder why," by Richard Feynman
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
"Young People," by Eric Davis P’89, ’90, ’08
They’re everywhere
the banks the museums the crosswalks
the sidewalk cafés
behind every counter in every ad
you can’t get a seat read a magazine
you have to shake them out of your clothes
out on the street they stand there talking
like one of the plagues of Egypt I’m telling you
they think they live here
the other day I got out of the shower and one of them
was standing right there putting on her makeup
I believe there’s been some mistake
I said but with a snap of her compact
she left, making no reply.