The Cruelest Month

But it's Poetry Month! Why would it be cruel?

Oh April,
I'm in a café before worktime
& on the table
there’s a little
succulent plant 
and a happy hour menu.

There’s still a 
few more weeks
of poetry left 
in your backpack.

Reggae music shakes the speakers
like maracas...

Oh April
your clouds stampede
across the sky’s plains
like billowy buffaloes.

And Callery pear
trees release their 
payload of buds, letters
of their poems scattered 
on the scented wind.

Meanwhile
over in unrealand
another payload of
exploding flowers turn
apartments, homes and hospitals
into graveyard stones.

And there are 
barely any lives 
left in that country’s 
blown out backpack.

Oh April,
is this why Eliot
called you the cruelest month?*

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*"April is the cruelest month" is the opening line of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land".

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