April is Poetry Month – send in your favorites

In celebration of April as Poetry Month, we’ll be posting a poem each day. Please send us your favorites, and we’ll make every attempt to post your selection, along with any comments you care to add.

The first poem is “A New Poet” by Linda Pastan. This poem was contributed by JoEllen Moldoff.

A New Poet

Finding a new poet
is like finding a new wildflower
out in the woods. You don’t see

its name in the flower books, and
nobody you tell believes
in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows
down the whole length of the page. In fact
the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea
on a foggy day — the odor of truth
and of lying.

And the words are so familiar,
so strangely new, words
you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil
or a pen or even a paintbrush,
if only there had been a flower.