National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month.

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As part of National Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets is offering a poem a day delivered to your mailbox.

Poem-A-Day
After 20,000 readers signed up in 2006, the Academy will again offer a daily dose of new poetry each day this April. The poems represent some of the best work being published in 2007, and include new poems by authors such as Eavan Boland, Henri Cole, Kevin Young, and Carl Dennis.

The poem for April 1 is from Noah Eli Gordon:

An exact comprehension of the composer’s intent

Cloudless sky, a tendril root, a chord begun
    as unfolding duration & one’s lost words,
a red lexicon, an empty definition

gathering its discourse—the flow from content
    to perception: language is a translation of grace.
Say the body, say the heart, a composition in blue,

the passing energy, cell, motion, inevitability;
    an impact until meaning wears through
the mind’s opulence, its spindle—a white thread.

Tethered to conviction, one says moon, one, emotion
    —the recurrence of night: a door will open,
shifting from anonymity to intellection—a translation

of sight with speech, awoken not by voice
    but what precedes it: the worldliness, wordless;
a measure of sound or movement to song.