It’s Poetry Month!

April is the month to celebrate poetry! And while we here at the Press rejoice it every day, we encourage our readers to take part with us in the celebration of National Poetry Month, established in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. Now is the time to start that spring cleaning by dusting off those poetry volumes and spreading the word— literally!

So, in honor of National Poetry Month we have decided to post a poem every day this April!

Today we give you this poem by Peter Sirr:

Desire

Reconstruct me from a closing bookshop,
from the panic of shelves
where old cars trick the spirit, manuals
of self-repair; gods, geography, money
and a little time. Sniff the air in poetry,
lay a blanket down and wait
where a furious concentration hunches over
Teach Yourself Amharic, Aramaic:
there’s hardly time to say hello, hardly
a hair’s breadth of the language to take away;
enough to be silent in, enough to watch
the insistent dust-motegrow its mountain, the dromedaries
appear. Someone is arguing
in Old Norse, the sun wakes up in Persian
and I am walking outwith grains of light, pyramid crumbs.
Elsewhere, in the desert, in the hilltop village,
On an endless, meandering train
The soul puts down its books, fluent again.

–Peter Sirr, from Selected Poems (2005)