Well, there are two days left in April, so I haven’t missed National Poetry Month in its entirety!  I usually do a big challenge for the month, reading a poet whose work is new to me (last year it was Emily Bronte; the year before that, Anna Akhmatova). But this year, with a newborn in the house, my challenge has been to get enough sleep so that I’m not completely dysfunctional, and National Poetry Month ended up getting back-burnered. But I hate to let the month go by without even a nod to my favorite poet, e.e. cummings.  So, better late than never, here’s a springy offering to close out your National Poetry Month:

Spring is like a perhaps hand

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
and inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

(That’s been our spring in upstate New York – tentative and cautious, but maybe finally here, I hope.)

One more time: happy National Poetry Month!