April -- National Poetry Month - begin with Creeley

OK, I am actually going to do this -- one poem a day for a month. I want to honor so much wonderful literature.

Since I am starting on the 2nd, I will begin with two. Both of these are by Robert Creeley, my favorite American post-modern poet. He died a couple of years ago, and I have visited and left flowers on his grave in Cambridge. I was lucky enough in life to have heard him read a number of times, and to have actually had lunch with him once. He was a force of nature.
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POEM
The Rain

by Robert Creeley
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
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and then this poem, "The Heart", which can be heard in his own gently insistent voice.


His memorial sites:
here Comes Everybody

Conjunctions which also has poems written in tribute.

Tom Raworth's site. Messages from friends. Even from an awe-struck fan like me.