Happy National Poetry Day!
The theme this year is Home. Libraries throughout Cambridgeshire have been putting up Poetry Washing Lines and inviting people to peg up their favourite poem or a poem that they have written. There's still time to go and peg up a poem in your local library or in Castle Court outside room B112.
Here are 3 poems for National Poetry Day.
Best wishes
Helen Taylor
Literature Development Officer
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O western wind
O western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Anon 14th century
To A Daughter Leaving Home
When I taught you at eight to ride a bicycle, loping along
beside you as you wobbled away on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved path of the park, I kept waiting
for the thud of your crash as I sprinted to catch up,
while you grew smaller, more breakable with distance,
pumping, pumping for your life, screaming with laughter,
the hair flapping behind you like a handkerchief waving
goodbye.
Linda Pastan
And Yet The Books
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
"We are, " they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
Czeslaw Milosz
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