April is National Poetry Month!

I am not the biggest poetry geek you'll ever meet. (That honor belongs to one of my managers at work. You really would have to meet him; words cannot do him justice.) Nor am I the most qualified to tell you what a poem means--if I were you, I'd go to a English major, anyone who's spent more time than me learning to critically dissect poetry. When it comes to poetry, I'm lucky to half-understand half of what I read. And I don't love everything. If it doesn't have rhyme, rhythm, or a discernible structure, you're going to have to work pretty hard to convince me to even look at it.

But. I love poetry like I love salt. Therefore, spam.


"The Choice," by Hilary Corke.

I have known one bound to a bed by wrist and ankle,
Scarred by the whips of a wasting ache,
Who, at the point of entering of the needle,
Looked once around to take
The final view, then spoke;
The echo of that terrible witty joke
Pursued the surgeon to his home in Kew
Deafened a nurse all night, and leaden lay
On the heart of a thick-skinned anesthetist
Long after they'd dispatched his ended clay.

That one lies in Oxford, and is its earth.
Also, a bright-eyed woman in Germany,
In a sightless trap, far below ground,
Of which another held the key
Surveyed without visible alarm
Or twitching of a pinioned arm
The instruments set out upon the table;
Then from her mouth there flowed a resolute
Stream of satire deliciously edged until
The tormentor tormented stopped it with a boot.

She fell as ash, not bones, in Dachau fields.
All brave men breathe her when the wind
Blows east from Danube. And Tom Caine,
When the Imperial was mined
And water had flooded all but the wireless room,
Spoke without audible gloom
From fifty fathoms down, for fifteen hours
To his messmates on land, told several stories,
Then to a doctor carefully described
Asphyxiation's onset and his doom.

He is grown water, and surrounds the pole.
If ever you dip a cup into any sea
Tom Caine is in it somewhere. On the whole
Men die asleep, or else disgracefully;
But not all men. Perhaps we are never,
By any average mountain, wood, or river,
More than a heart's breadth from the dust
Of one who laughed with nothing left to lose.
Who saw the joke beneath the mammoth's foot?
And what shall I choose, if I am free to choose?