A Special Anouncement and Poem of the Week

Overcome with modesty, I've decided to run one of my poems (about spring) this week as the Biscuit City Poem of the Week.  Congratulations to me for being chosen. By me. Well, enough of that!

I also want to announce that Biscuit City will be taking next week off for Spring Break. The Biscuit City staff will be spending the time together at the Biscuit City Condo Complex just outside Biscuit City, Florida, located on the Gulf Coast. If you're in the area, drop in and meet some of the folks who seem to exist only on paper, on the airwaves or in a world of fantasy. If they're not golfing, you might have a chance to rub elbows with Biscuit City Chief of Staff Molly Bolt or her counterpart, Harrison Bergeron of MB & HB Enterprises, which is a proud sponsor of the "Extra Gravy" segment of the Biscuit City Network . Or join us for happy hour overlooking the beach and sunset every evening on the Grand Verandah.  Cash bar, please and formal attire required.

Biscuit City will return April 9 at its usual location. Until then, be safe, be well and call when you get there.

Now to the Poem of the Week:
 

Three Songs for an Early Spring

i

Four cycle engines that once roamed the great grasslands

Migrated north last fall, herding  leaves ,

Singing high pitched leaf herding songs.

In the frozen north, they animated snow machines

Flying over the packed accumulation

Leaving a few behind to clear snow

In the mid-Atlantic.

Toward early spring they moved south in vast herds

Churning through flat grasslands

Arriving at last at the place they left from

Roaring their triumph over the leaves of grass

Sounding their  barbaric yawp over the earth.

They  would have made Whitman proud

Were he not sleeping under the grass himself.

ii

Today the great white yard waste trucks growled and snorted

Distantly all through the morning and afternoon hours

Their handlers gathering sticks and branches and leaves and grass

Offered by residents as tribute to the new season.

The truck in turn pulled to the curb in front of my house

And took all my yard waste.

I felt gratitude and relief that my offering had been accepted

By the great white behemoth.

Like Moby Dick, these monsters of the street

Live in our dreams, haunt our nightmares, fuel our obsessions,

Are the color of ambiguity, the color of purity,

The color of cleanliness,  the color of

Death.

 No one gets out of this life

Alive.

iii

My mother said that as a gardener I made a pretty good reader.

And so I said that sounded good and went inside to practice my

Reading

While she taught plants to thrive.

Now I am a writer of sorts

Inside most of the time

But today I’m outside

Sowing ideas

Editing flower beds

Revising shrubbery structures

Punching up piles of leaves

Readying all for a spring publication of thought and whimsey

And maybe even a plant or two.

Dan Verner