National Poetry Day: Light

Today is National Poetry Day.

Poetry is the fine dining of literature. We spend most of our days tossing together the everyday pasta of prose, finding a few quick metaphors in the fridge and splashing in a dash of humour to add to the flavour.

But sometimes we want to spend the extra time to make a meal to linger over. We pick out the best of our rare similes and assemble them artfully, paying careful attention to rhyme and metre. The restrictions force us to pare down to the essentials, letting the flavour of the ingredients speak for themselves. The intention is not just to sate the appetite for words, but to stroke the senses and stir the imagination. To create an occasion. A poem.

I'm afraid my blog is not a fine dining establishment this evening. I tried to put some ingredients together, but they somehow failed to produce anything worth keeping. Fortunately others are better poetry chefs than I am, and they have left a menu. You can enjoy the free National Poetry Day book here, with poems new and old on the theme of light.

Bon appetit!

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Mr White Watson of Bakewell

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