I don’t count on Facebook to remind me of birthdays, anniversaries, appointments or celebrations. I have a wall calendar, and each year I transcribe from the previous year all the events and people and dates I want to remember and reflect on — the happy, the sad, the mundane.

April is a month with a surfeit of dates and people to remember. Let me tell you about one: my maternal grandfather, Joseph T. McCauley. He was the only grandparent I really knew because the other three all died either before I was born or when I was just a child. My Grampa Joe died when I was a junior in college and it was a gut punch. Joe McCauley, or J.T. as his daughters called him in his retirement, was a first-generation Irish-American. His dad was, for real, a Boston cop.

Joe’s father died while he was still in high school, so he quit school and went to work to support his mother and siblings. I am not sure that he ever graduated from high school; I sure wish I knew more about his back story, his family, and his young life. So he went to work as a teenager and eventually came to be employed at the Allied Kid Company, a finisher of leather goods (mostly in the manufacture of shoes). Management offices were in Boston, and plants where hides were prepared and processed were in Wilmington, Delaware, among other places. He came, eventually, to rise in the ranks, which is remarkable to me because I know he never went to college and he might not have even graduated high school. The leather goods industry in and around Boston was the work — in the office and in the plant — of minorities and immigrants and most of Grampa Joe’s coworkers were Jewish. In the 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond, he could not take some of his colleagues to certain restaurants in Boston and they could not join private country clubs (because they were excluded as Jewish people), so he would golf with his friends at public courses and more amenable establishments.

His is a real American success story: the son of immigrants, thrown by adversity into work at a young age, who went on to achieve, for himself and his family, the benefits of a prosperous retirement. Anyway, he was dear to me and was born on 9 April 1899, so he would have been 125 this year.

Also in April our eldest son was born (who is named after Joseph T. McCauley), my cousin Ellen shares a birthday with our Joe, our friend Bob in Pennsylvania turned 93 earlier this month, and Bill B. is 86 today. My dear sister-in-law Sandy has a birthday this month and her son, our nephew Aidan, has one in a few days. My college professor friend, Dave, who has become a great pen pal, has an April birthday, as does Kimberly Sue. Joe and Christina were married in April, and my parents would have been married for 66 years on April 12th. Aunt Susan and Uncle David both died in the month of April. That is just a fraction of the people on my April calendar. I look up, see those names, and either remember people, or I put a card in the mail.

But I digress (quite spectacularly).

I write this month in praise and honor of April as National Poetry Month. Some readers will, understandably, roll their eyes, but I want to encourage everyone to give poetry a chance or go back to the poetry they might have dreaded in high school.

True confession: I have come to appreciate poetry late in life. Why that is, I could not say, but it has been a great comfort and guide and companion to me in the last ten or fifteen years, which should be a signal to anyone that it is never too late to give poetry a try.

I have some favorite poets and some favorite snippets of verse that I want to share with you in hopes that you will do a little research, see what you can find online, go to the Marshall Public or school library, and read up. The truly lovely thing about poetry is that you can glean and enjoy so much from a poem without using a great deal of intellectual bandwidth. You can pick up a book of verse, read a couple of poems, put it down, take it back up, consider the takeaways, re-read a favorite poem, dog-ear a page. And well-written verse, the economy and visceral strength of it is a boon to writers. Less is more (a maxim I find hard to honor here). Any poetry quoted directly below is in italics.

From the great Sufi mystic and poet, Jelalludin Rumi (1207 — 1273), I have gone back to this stanza from his “A Great Wagon” many times in the last five years.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing,

There is a field. I’ll meet you there.

My dad died just days after the late great representative to Congress and Civil Rights champion, John Lewis, in the summer of 2020. At Lewis’s funeral, the poem “Invictus” by William Earnest Henley (1849 — 1903) was read. The final two lines are: I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. Those are very powerful words to me.

A personal favorite, words to live by, reflect on, and embrace as a mantra is the final stanza from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1807 — 1882) “A Psalm of Life”

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

Billy Collins was once America’s Poet Laureate. I have a whole collection of his slim volumes of poetry. When I taught first-year writing to college students, I had them buy Collins’s Sailing Alone Around the Room. It was a feeble effort at poetry appreciation. Not sure I made any converts, but Collins is a talented and witty poet who writes about everyday experiences and people. These opening lines from “The History Teacher’’ still make me giggle.

Trying to protect his students’ innocence

he told them the Ice Age was really just

the Chilly Age, a period of a million years

when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,

named after the long driveways of the time. . . .

In the same book are terrific poems about memory, libraries, the incessant barking of the neighbors’ dog, and finding History (capital H) snoring on the couch. Can’t go wrong with Billy Collins.

Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir of her childhood, Brown Girl Dreaming, is told entirely in verse. The winner of the National Book Award and a Newbery Honor book, it is absolutely — I say absolutely — fabulous.

Back to the venerable poets of many centuries ago. Kabir was an Indian poet and mystic who lived from 1440 — 1518. In his poem “The Time Before Death” he poses one of the most pressing and fundamental questions anyone of us will face:

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive

do you think

ghosts will do it after?

Think on that.

Natasha Tretheway, born in Mississippi, was also the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012 — 2104. In both verse and narratives, she chronicles life in the South, her search and research about American identity, as well as the small, shared experiences of all folks. As in “Housekeeping,” which begins with these words:

We mourn the broken things, chair legs

wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,

the threadbare clothes. We work the magic

of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.

We save what we can, . . .

I was briefly an elementary librarian and poetry of various kinds makes great read-aloud for the little people. I am a big fan of “Disobedience” by A. A. Milne, which appears in his collection When We Were Very Young. My Mom’s friend Richard and I recited these lines together, lines he probably first heard at home 90 years ago. The mind, and memory, are remarkable. Do you recall this childhood poem?

James James

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupreee

Took great

Care of his Mother

Though he was only three.

James James

Said to his Mother,

“Mother,” he said, said he:

“You must never go down to the end of town

if you don’t go down with me. . . . “

~ page 32

I am a huge fan of Mary Oliver, a poet, essayist, and observant naturalist. The snippet below is from her poem “Wild Geese,” which I have on the wall next to my bureau.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

In her collection Blue Horses (2014), Oliver’s second poem of the book, is this one, “What I Can Do,” which I have copied here in its entirety — because it is short and funny.

The television has two instruments that control it.

I get confused.

The washer asks me, do you want regular or delicate?

Honestly, I just want clean.

Everything is like that.

I won’t even mention cell phones.

I can turn on the the light of the lamp beside my chair

Where a book is waiting, but that’s about it.

Oh yes, I can strike a match and make fire.

~ page 3

And, finally, aren’t song lyrics also, and fundamentally, poetry? Of course. I close with these lyrics from songwriters and musicians I cherish.

I only have James Taylor’s “New Hymn” on a live album and have hardly ever heard it elsewhere or heard him perform it. This section is from the middle of the song, a haunting and lyrical evocation of all that might weigh on our hearts and souls.

Even our own feeble hands

Aim to seize the crown you wear

And work our private havoc through

The known and unknown lands of space.

Absolute in flame beyond us

Seed and source of Dark and Day

Maker whom we beg to be

Our mother, father, comrade, mate. . . .

Beautiful as poetry, even more beautiful when put to song.

I close here with songwriting geniuses, The Beatles:

And in the end

the love you take

is equal to the love

that you make.

~ “The End,” John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Now go, people, and take up a book of poetry, some lines of verse, read with your eyes the lyrics of songs you love. Godspeed this National Poetry Month.