Here’s to World Poetry Day!
It’s World Poetry Day this month,
how very exciting!
I’ll have to see about coming up
with a little ditty in honour of the day.
I will write a sonnet, perhaps a series of haiku,
or maybe a villanelle.
I will try and capture in verse
just what poetry means to me,
how the ‘best words in the best order’,
have given me so much over the years,
about how the greats have inspired me,
I will wax lyrical about the
wonder of Wordsworth,
Whitman, Dickinson and Keats,
Dylan Thomas and John Cooper Clarke.
How their words move and motivate
more than I can say,
how they shine like a light in the dark.
When is the big day exactly?
World Poetry day is Friday 21st March.
Excellent.
I check the calendar.
Friday 21st March?
Wait, that’s today?
Today?!
I scramble around for my pen and paper,
like that late-for-school school-kid
who hasn’t done his homework,
like a husband who has forgotten
his wedding anniversary.
I arrive at the venue as the event is starting,
clutching my feeble scribblings,
these crumpled pages,
my last-minute poem,
the literary equivalent
of petrol-station flowers.