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 SwallowsErica McAlpine Whatever the difference might beto one who knows,we couldn’t seefrom where we stood in soft shadowsany signs that they were swallows or bats. That there were wingswas without doubt;you could see small pointed thingsswooping outinto the gloaming– and sometimes back.One seemed almost iridescentas I tried to trackits crescentflight across the hill. The lack of sound suggestedbats to me;you strained to see if they nestedsomewhere below theterrace, having rested your case on swallows.We couldn’t be sure either way–and so it followsthat neither of us knows.But since it is in your nature always to side one wayor the other, you holdthat they were swallows. I saythe 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