Happy National Poetry Day!

This may not be about running but running helps us appreciate what we love.

I love poetry.  It's hard to tell sometimes since I am such a novice at reading it but there's nothing like a bite-sized bit of English-language glory to make you want to SEIZE the day, pray a prayer, love your mom, cry cause you can, or sign up for a crazy marathon.

Poetry has changed me.  In a darker time in my faith, Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven" actually incited some repenting, some life change.  There was that spring so filled with the weight of suffering around me, that T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" gave so much sense to the dry bones that is the fight for life.  There was that Christmas break I read all of Cate's poems trying to pick out the best ones to publish and deciding they're all perfect.  And there was that day two weeks ago that I got an e-mail I'd get a poem published, in a PA medical journal no less!

Poetry matters and it tells us what our culture deems valuable.  Poetry is inadvertently always pro-life because death hurts; we know it does.  This subtle truth become evident when people hash out the realities of being human in well-choiced words always coming back to truth: I must matter somehow; this must  be purposeful, life; I know I was supposed to be born.

I recommend following poetry and observing what the arts are saying, who and what matters, and listening to poetry if you can.  It's a music form that fills you up.

Sometimes it's just brilliant to listen to T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost or Edna St. Vincet Millay or local poets just read their own poetry...

Here's Edna herself.

Happy National Poetry Day!  Read a poem, or write one after being inspired after a run.

The leaves, even in the mucky ground, are just GORGEOUS