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Last weekly poetry challenge

Apr 29, 2020

For the fourth and last week of National Poetry Month, we are challenging you to write an acrostic poem.  Adults and kids will both have fun with this one!  Share your acrostic work with your family and friends, on social media with #NPM2020, and with us @OPL_BPO.

There is still time to sow some inspiration in these last few days of Poetry Month, described by T.S. Eliot in what has been called the most important poem of the twentieth century:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

  • The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot, 1922

Check out suggestions and available resources in this blog post.

And we are honoured to offer you a third poem from Ottawa’s English poet laureate, Deanna Young, for your enjoyment:

We Gather

In daylight we walk upon the land

like living children, a sunburnt tribe towards the woods

where light flashes among the trees like money.

Drawn to where the cow lies, her clean skull resting

on its pillow of musty leaves. White rib cage

a church where faeries pray

for their delicate lives, minutely sing.

In exile, we gather solemnly there to worship

what might lie beyond this place, where the cow

in her devastation now peacefully lives.

Where later, in pools of moonlight, we will swim,

fear lapping at our beds. For shore

we will swim, the other side, that shimmering

pasture where the cow still lows, still grazes. Wet grass

flecked white and yellow, the sweetest buds.

—from Reunion (Brick Books, 2018)