Today was February 2nd, the sort of still but maybe no longer annual Bloggers’ (Silent) Poetry Reading in honor of St. Brigid, patron saint of poetry.

I missed last year, in part because the tradition has mostly gone by the wayside. But I liked it when we all shared poetry on our blogs, so I’m resuming it, at least for 2020.

This one is for the English majors and poetry geeks amongst us:

A Tale of Two Metres
     ~Tom Disch

I heard a little couplet cry:
‘Will God or Someone tell me why
We couplets are condemned to squeeze
Our wisdom into shapes like these?
To speak with gravity and treat
Of higher truths one needs more feet:
Four will not do! Four are too few.
Five feet for me or I am through!’

Not only I but Poesy had heard:
She raised her sceptre, uttered not a word,
But struck the couplet dead. And what do you think?
Its ashes stirred — and formed, in living ink,
A couplet calm as Zeno and as stoic —
The couplet known to fame as The Heroic.

In previous years, I’ve shared poems by Sharon Olds, Emily Dickinson, Kyle Dargan, Barbara Crooker, William Stafford, Mary Oliver (twice), Wislawa Szymborska, Stuart Dischell, Jean Esteve, John Frederick Nims, Grace Paley, Heather McHugh, and Barbara Hamby, all of which are worth another read.