"Come, stranger, sister, dove" 10,000 visitors !

I'm thrilled to announce that my poetry blog/website has received ten thousand visitors since it went online in November 2010.

Most readers hail from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Russia, Germany, India, Pakistan, France, and Indonesia; followed by visitors from Italy, Argentina, Uruguay, Denmark, Greece, and The Netherlands. But there have also been readers from China, Japan, United Arab Emirates, Moldova, Colombia, Venezuela, and other nations as well.

Thank you, everyone, for stopping by and I hope you'll be back soon!

In celebration of this milestone, below is my poem, "All These Words", after Richard Wilbur's "All These Birds".

All These Words

(after Richard Wilbur)

Agreed that all these words —

verb and adjective, noun and preposition —

    align premeditated on the page;

    each sound, each sememe willing to engage

    the silence of the surds;

                                    that the metrician

            may be a dying breed,

            a dodo bird. Agreed

            that it is, in fact, a plan,

a scheme, a plot which, whether dastardly or not,

    attempts to order chaos via meter,

    just like the other wordsmiths (only neater)

    with words that rhyme and scan.

                                    An afterthought:

            agreed the lines are drawn —

            it’s owl versus swan.

           

            But let us part as friends,

Dear Reader, for the pure word’s sake; for the design

     or lack thereof, and for the sake of love;

     for hawk and lark, for sparrow, stork and dove;

     for what transcends

                                    the stanza, line,

            and for the hope that sings

            through words and feathered things.

           

( © Catherine Chandler, first published in The Lyric, Summer 2008, vol. 88, No. 3)