April is National Poetry Month!

"Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets throughout the United States band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. Thousands of organizations participate through readings, festivals, book displays, workshops, and other events." - from Poets.org

Let's kick off National Poetry Month with " N" by Maurya Simon

N

Noon. I can connect nothing with nothing.

Perhaps even chaos is cause for celebration.

And perhaps the astrologers are right when they chart

one disaster, one propitious night, one happenstance

of glory to the next so they accrue like an alphabet

in the primer of each person's life. I read my horoscope

each day, searching for the solitary clue, the sign

signalling my journey's halt, when I might look up

at last into the stars, connect-the-dots--see, at once,

the bright Virgin standing steadfastly like a silver ship

docked among the midnight swarms, her left hand

  beckoning

to me, as if nothing floats between us but the world. 

 ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Maurya Simon is the author of Ghost Orchid (Red Hen Press, 2004), Weavers (2000), The Golden Labyrinth (1995), Speaking in Tongues (1991), Days of Awe (1990), and The Enchanted Room (1986). She is the recipient of a 1999 NEA fellowship in poetry, and she has been awarded a University Award from The Academy of American Poets, the Celia B. Wagner and Lucille Medwick Memorial Awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright/Indo-American Fellowship. Simon has been a Fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, as well as a Fellow at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Grand Street, Agni, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Calyx, New England Review, and in more than fifty additional literary magazines and journals. Her poetry has also been collected in more than a dozen anthologies. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside and lives in Mt. Baldy, in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains, in southern California.