Poetry month

April is National Poetry Month.

I enjoy poetry. I don't post about it much here and I have to admit that lately, I've not taken much time to read it, other than to occasionally look up an old favorite from the past.

And I have a few newer favorites as well. Here's one that I stumbled across a couple years ago, around the time of my birthday, when I was feeling a bit of that societally-sanctioned depression over getting older. I love the poem partly because there's some truth to it, but also because the AUTHOR is so unexpected to me:

A Lady Who Thinks She Is Thirty

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What's a year, or thirty, to
Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then--
How old is Spring, Miranda?

Ogden Nash

Yes! Ogden Nash! The poet I had previously mainly known for flip verses like:

"Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker."

and all of those punning animal poems that are so often used in grade-school language arts classes.

But I like that he wrote some more serious, more thoughtful verse.

(I wonder if there actually was a "Miranda," or if she was merely a creation for the poem.)