Design

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April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me).

My poetry suggestions are starting to run dry, which means I will start posting my own favorites (but you've seen many of those already) or you can send me your favorite poems, which I probably haven't read before! Today's poem was suggested by another reader of mine, who said it has always been one of his favorites.

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

-- Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged (Henry Holt and Co.; 1969).

More like this

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

- William Carlos Williams

Dag-nabbit my spacing is off. Forgot some things.

Really anything by WCW. I loves it, I does.

And what, no Ginsberg?

I love your bird pictures! I'd love to get some that close-up. Please visit me at mdoncall.blogspot.com. Keep up the writing!

I like a lot of Robert Frost, but I gotta say, despite how much my high school English teacher loved it, Design isn't a favourite.