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Beginning in 2018 "Ruth's Neighborhood" entries were also posted on Ruth's FACEBOOK page where her entries (usually weekly, on Sunday mornings) lead to lively conversations.

This Page: April - June 2026

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH 2026

April 5, 2026

          National Poetry Month has begun! As I did in April 2019 I’ll start my choices of poems to post this month with some lines from one of Anne Bradstreet’s poems, “The Prologue.” I’ve consulted Wikipedia to refresh my memory about dates, etc.:
Anne Bradstreet was born in England in 1612 and married at age sixteen. In 1630 she and her parents and husband came to America. She had eight children. She died in 1672. Her father and husband helped found Harvard University; in 1997 a gate at Harvard was dedicated to her, “America’s first published poet.”

 . . . I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A Poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong;
For such despite they cast on Female wits,
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance—
They’l say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chanc
          This makes me think of a Dorothy Parker poem, “Fighting Words,” which I’ve also quoted here before:

Say my love is easy had,
     Say I’m bitten raw with pride,
Say I am too often sad—
     Still behold me at your side.

Say I’m neither brave nor young,
     Say I woo and coddle care,
Say the devil touched my tongue—
     Still you have my heart to wear.

But say my verses do not scan,
     And I get me another man!

          Don and I used to recall that in our “courtship” I had quoted this to him. Amused, we had agreed that he would only correct me on technical stuff, such as cars and carpentry.
          Of course in our decades together I actually conferred with him about much more and when he read my manuscripts he mentioned problems he encountered. But of the “do not scan” type of problem in my prose I can only remember in detail the first one. When we were at Keene Teachers’ College, both of us taking the Advanced Writing course, I wrote a short story whose distraught heroine “ran out into the night.” Don gently told me that he hated when people ran out into the night in stories. I immediately rewrote the sentence and I think I can safely say nobody has run out into the night in anything I’ve written since.
          April at last! Here are Robert Frost’s too-true lines I’m always quoting in April to remind myself of the fickle weather, from “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

© 2026 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

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