Happy National Poetry Day.

It is National Poetry Day today and the theme is Stars.

Here are our back garden Tamar Valley stars, (spot the Plough) and a poem to accompany that somehow touched a chord with me when I read it for the first time last week.

Listen!

Listen,
if stars are lit
it means - there is someone who needs it.
It means - someone wants them to be,
that someone deems those specks of spit
magnificent.
And overwrought,
in the swirls of afternoon dust,
he bursts in on God,
afraid he might be already late.
In tears,
he kisses God's sinewy hand
and begs him to guarantee
that there will definitely be a star.
He swears
he won't be able to stand that starless ordeal.
Later,
He wanders around, worried,
but outwardly calm.
And to everyone else, he says:
'Now,
it's all right.
You are no longer afraid,
are you?'
Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means - there is someone who needs it.
It means it is essential
that every evening
at least one star should ascend
over the crest of the building.

 

–Vladimir Mayakovsky 1914

 

My thanks to Susannah Herbert, the new executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation who will be busy furthering the cause of poetry, and who did just that by posting this one on her Facebook timeline.

It somehow joined up with my picture perfectly.