I tried hard to get part three of our current series ready for today but didn’t quite get there. Monday! For today, a poem that absolutely delighted me when I saw it in The Atlantic last year. The internal rhyme! The line breaks! I hope you enjoy.

Bats and Swallows
Erica McAlpine

Whatever the difference might be
to one who knows,
we couldn’t see
from where we stood in soft shadows
any signs that they were swallows

or bats. That there were wings
was without doubt;
you could see small pointed things
swooping out
into the gloaming–

and sometimes back.
One seemed almost iridescent
as I tried to track
its crescent
flight across the hill. The lack

of sound suggested
bats to me;
you strained to see if they nested
somewhere below the
terrace, having rested

your case on swallows.
We couldn’t be sure
either way–and so it follows
that neither of us knows.
But since it is in your nature

always to side one way
or the other, you hold
that they were swallows. I say
the question never gets old,
that either, or both, hold sway.

Photo from Warren Photographic

I was clearing out a few notebooks from college this weekend and found this poem I had copied out. It reminds me of my Dad, how he’d be up before the rest of us to add logs to our wood stove day after day, all winter. I thought you might like it, too.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

— Robert Hayden

Many years ago I used to share poems quite often (the last one in 2011). There are some breathtaking gems in those archives, if you’re looking for something beautiful today.

Photo by Whitney Neal via Southern Weddings

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.
I’ll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I’ll get back
to the poem. I’ll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there’s a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it’s done.

— Tess Gallagher

Image by Beaux Arts Photographie via Style Me Pretty. Read up on other Friday poems here.

1

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path leading wherever I choose.

9

Allons! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling
we cannot remain here,
However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must
not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted
to receive it but a little while.

11

Listen! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve…

15

Allons! the road is before us!
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

— Walt Whitman

Just a little love note to send you off into Valentine’s weekend. If you’re interested in reading the whole thing, click here. Photo by Millie Holloman.