Poor Carl. I'm so fickle. I pledged to spend a year with him, and yet here it is another Friday, and I've not got a Complete Poems reading report for you. It's not that his words have lost their allure - oh, no; not that -- it's just been a busy stretch, and I temporarily abandoned my daily Sandburg read-aloud habit. But I'm now back on track, and next week, I promise, I'll have a read-aloud report.
In the meantime, here's a poem of my own for you...
February
I want to go outside
in short shirtsleeves
and feel the sun on my arms;
feel my freckles rise up,
collectively,
to denounce the dark of winter.
I want to catch the scent of growth,
and fill myself with the earnest smell of things to come.
Most of all,
I want to tell that infernal groundhog
that he’s a no-good, two-bit whistlepig varmint
who should find himself a new line of work
and never again darken our days
with his useless shadow.
But, instead,
I zip up my coat,
slip my ten fingers into their fleecy corrals,
snug my head into my hat;
and take it on faith
that spring
will not
forsake me.