About April Being 'the Cruellest Month'

 

Regardless of hemisphere,

how can we say now

which month is the cruellest?

All the weather everywhere

has gone extreme, in ways

that appear capricious

though in fact a logical response

to our silly, greedy, or just-

plain-thoughtless tinkering.

It’s a wild world we live in now,

not yet a wasteland, perhaps –

or only in portions, where the wars are –

but it’s coming, that time 

we used to call the future, so much 

closer now … inevitable, inexorable. 

                                ***

In April we make poems,

many of us, around the so-called

civilised world. That’s not

the same as civil. Oh, if we could all

be (truly, deeply) civil to each other! Maybe 

then, poems would have some meaning. 

The ‘legislators of society’ now

are the money-makers, the big

money-spenders to make more.

Headlong to our doom,

we might as well make poems

as we plunge over the cliff.

Is the cruellest month the one 

in which most suffered, died …?

Or that which offered hope?

Notes: 

April is poetry month in America and is now observed in many other countries too, particularly in the (international) online poetic community. Many people commit to write a poem a day for this month, often to prompts published in specific online poetic groups.

In 'The Defence of Poetry' 1821, the poet Shelley claimed that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'.

The line, 'April is the Cruelest month' begins T.S. Eliot's poem, 'The Waste Land'.

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This piece was written for Friday Writings #170 at Poets and Storytellers United.