National Poetry Month is here

Couple of things from poet out-in-the-field Christine Valentine, who is also a member of WyoPoets and Wyoming Writers. One is a link to a wonderful spoken word performance by Joshua Bennett, Princeton scholar, who was chosen to be part of the very first White House Poetry Jam in 2009.

http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2012/04/04/pages/9489/index.xml

And a poem from Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry series, Column 367

Prairie Sure by Carol Light

Would I miss the way a breeze dimples
the butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings,
or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms?
The learning gossip, the half-alive ripple
of sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn
and sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow
in all directions, the windowsills swelling
with Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne
through tinted glass above the milled grains?
The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door
slapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs,
the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains,
and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure-
the rote grace of every tempered life?