Day 1: That the Science of Cartography is Limited

That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.Look down you said: this was once a famine road.I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.

-Eavan Boland


**Celebrating National Poetry Month with a new poem each day in April**

This Just In: You Don’t Have to Finish Every Book: A Tiny List of Popular Books I Couldn’t Finish (And Don’t Feel the Least Bit Bad About)

Until recently, I was self-conscious about not finishing books. I beat myself up pretty badly if I couldn’t finish a book. I mean an all-out mental slugfest. Picture Jim Carrey in “Liar, Liar,” splayed about in the bathroom stall with his head being repeatedly smashed—by his own hands—between the toilet base and the toilet seat yelling, “I’m kicking my own ass! Do you mind?!” to a poor old man who had asked him what he was doing. People have layers of interesting bookshelves on Goodreads. I have always longed to have a “Books I Couldn’t Finish” shelf but have always been embarrassed to create such a controversial shelf. After all, there are those who believe that one of the cardinal sins is not reading a book all the way through. I used to be one of them. The external naysayers all asked, “Well, how do you REALLY know you don’t like it if you don’t finish it?” My answer to that question is that if I’m still miserable about halfway through or if my interest is not piqued by the end of the first quarter then chances are it never will be. I believe that reading should be enjoyable not something you have to force yourself to slog through. After receiving that revelation, I am no longer ashamed. Proudly, I present to you a tiny list of books I couldn’t finish…

• Hunger Games
o This book has all of the makings of a bestselling phenomenon turned major motion picture trilogy and a half. Wait a minute…it is. While I usually find that I am allergic to the hype that some novels have piggybacking on their spines, the premise of this title sparked my curiosity. That spark faded approximately one quarter of the way into this book and I was left disappointed and feeling very, “meh.”

• Gone Girl
o Oh, hey, here’s another book shining brightly in the spotlight at the end of the long red carpet of hype. The cringing began with the first sentence, “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.” Say what now?

• Wuthering Heights
o This one is the most disappointing one of all. Not in content—well, sort of—but rather disappointment in myself for not being able to get past the first few chapters. A classic. I know. Believe me I really tried! I have attempted to read this four times and find myself unable to read further in roughly the same vicinity in the book each and every time. I know there are readers out there who LOVE this book and read it every year. I want to be that person. As of yet, I am not. But, having said that, because it is a classic, I will certainly try to give this one yet another whirl. Maybe.

• Fifty Shades of Grey
o Seriously? Please.

The Chosen Ones

The Fifteen Lives of Harry August. That's a new title I picked up at the book store the other day. As a reader, that's what we do, with each book, we live another life. In some ways I think that reading stories about other people, by other people, makes living our own lives a little easier. In other ways I think they have distorted our view of the way things really function in this world.

Currently, I'm reading the second installment of the Divergent series, Insurgent. Splayed across the top of the dark olive green cover in stark white block letters reads, "One Choice Can Destroy You." Not all that profound when you read it...but after it swishes around in your mouth for a few moments you realize the brutal truth within this small, simple statement. And the thing is, you can apply it to any aspect of your life. After all, life is just a series of choices. Like Michelle Pfeiffer says in Dangerous Minds, "Every day you make a choice. You choose to get on that bus. That is a choice. There are no victims in this classroom." "One Choice Can Destroy You." But the choice is always yours.

Joyce Meyer is a female evangelist who I listen to occasionally on television or on audio when I'm riding in the car. In a fantastic audio series of a conference she participated in on the theme of love, Joyce said, "You can't wait around until you feel like serving God . . . or praying, [or making a positive change in your relationship with your spouse or family member or friend]. If you wait on feeling like it, you will be waiting an eternity. You have to make the decision to choose to do [these things]. The excitement, the desire to continue, the evolution of it all will naturally fall into place. But it starts when you choose."

Make like Michael Jackson, start with the man in the mirror.

Swallow pride. Bury fears. Remove the veil from vulnerability. If you can't trust your special someone with these things, who can you trust?

Be the choice you want to see in the world.

Choose, today.

Day 17 - My Limbs Are Made Glorious

Stream Of Life

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

-Rabindranath Tagore

Day 16 - The Roots of our Landscape

Coastal Plain

The only clouds
forming are crow clouds,

the only shade, oaks
bound together in a tangle of oak

limbs that signal the wind
coming, if there is any wind

stroking the flat
fields, the flat

swatch of corn.
Far as anyone’s eye can see, corn’s

dying under the sky
that repeats itself either as sky

or as water
that won’t remain water

for long on the highway: its shimmer
is merely the shimmer

of one more illusion that yields
to our crossing as we ourselves yield

to our lives, to the roots
of our landscape. Pull up the roots

and what do we see but the night
soil of dream, the night

soil of what we call
home. Home that calls

and calls
and calls.

-Kathryn Stripling Byer

Day 15 - What Will Survive Of Us Is Love

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine On their backs stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.


-Philip Larkin

Day 14 - Your Dream-Ladder to Divinity

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

-David Whyte