It's National Poetry Month

And I'm slow jumping on the band wagon. It's been the business of life and a book deadline that's making me irregular on the blog. I love poetry, and I've been reading some of the wonderful blog posts over the last week featuring poetry for children and adults. I've enjoyed the daily interviews with poets over at The Miss Rumphius Effect. Loved the reader's theater version of Love that Dog, one of my favorite novels in verse. Take a few minutes and view it here.

I've been reading, too. I just finished Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, a novel in verse by Ron Koertge. A perfect combination to the first Atlanta Braves baseball game this week. And I'm in the middle of Beanball, another baseball novel . Loving the way Gene Fehler handles such a tragic drama in verse.

Since the reader's theater book I'm working on is about explorers, I hunted down a few poems on the subject to share this month. I just finished a script on the Antarctic expeditions by Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen. This poem by Joseph Brodsky paints the polar experience in just a few short lines.

A Polar Explorer
by Joseph Brodsky

All the huskies are eaten. There is no space
left in the diary. And the beads of quick
words scatter over his wife's sepia-shaped face
adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek.
Next, the snapshot of his sister. He doesn't spare his kin:
What's been reached is the highest possible latitude!
And, like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude
queen, it climbs up his thigh: gangrene.


Roald Amundsen, first explorer to reach the geographic South Pole.








Robert Falcon Scott, reached the South Pole a few weeks after Amundsen. He and his four companions died on the return journey, just 11 miles from their resupply station.