Monday Musings

As April draws to a close, so does National Poetry Month. For poets, traditional events include  Poem-A-Day (PAD) challenges , such as those posted daily by  Robert Lee Brewer  of Writer’s Digest. For those poets who are hardy enough to actually compose 30 poems during the month, there is an opportunity to submit their creative works on the Poetic Asides site and discuss them with poets worldwide. Poets have used the Writer’s Digest  April PAD challenge  as a springboard to create poetry books from their compilation of poems. The haiku world sponsors its own recognition of the PAD theme but stretches it through the entire year. For example, take a look at the daily posts of the Haiku Foundation:  Haiku of the Day 2022 .  The  Academy of American Poets  honors the month with special observances. Every year the organization produces a poster. In addition, the Academy puts out the  Poem in Your Pocket  volume (available in a downloadab...

One day last April (April 13th), the ruby-throated hummingbirds and the whip-poor-wills returned. I wondered if it was a coincidence.  On April 15, 2022, they appeared at our Blue Ridge Mountain home: the  hummingbirds  during the day; the  whip-poor-will  that same night. This sparked my curiosity about the two species and bird migration. The Audubon Society has a beautiful website and a great  Twitter page , and both provide an abundance of information on our feathered friends. Last year I found an interesting website:  BirdCast , sponsored by Colorado State University and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The site has live  migration tools  that allow you to see how many millions of birds are flying on a particular night. These maps predict nocturnal migration (three hours after local sunset with updates every six hours). You can even look at your  local area  to see if birds will be passing overhead near your city. In ad...

Today, April 11, 2022, is National Pet Day, but for pet owners, it’s every day! (No matter how ornery they can be.) “Pets are humanizing. They remind us we have an obligation and responsibility to preserve and nurture and care for all life.” James Cromwell The official launch of Pet Day occurred in 2006 to mark the joy we get from our pets and emphasize the need for shelter animals to be adopted rather than “shopped” from breeders. Pets have shared a home with humans for centuries. Mesopotamia wall paintings from 3500 BC show a man with a collared, leashed dog. In 900 BC, Phoenician traders brought domesticated cats to Europe. In the US, to further protect our companions, Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866. Americans have a variety of species as pets. And believe it or not, there are 5000–7000 tigers kept as pets in the US (checking next door…). According to the National Institute of Health, pets are fun, but they’re good for menta...

Russia has pulled out of Kyiv and many other towns and cities. In their wake, unimaginable atrocities have been exposed to the world. Twitter feeds are awash with reels of ravaged women, tortured men, burnt and executed victims, lying in streets, yards, and buried in mass graves. A word of warning, once seen, these images cannot be unseen. [If you are a survivor of prior trauma, please take care in viewing the pictures online and in the links below as they certainly will be triggering.] That said, we must see these horrors to understand what is truly happening and consider them in our future political decisions. WWIII looms large. After the Nazi camps and their ethnic cleansing, the world said, “Never again,” yet 75 years later, we see the same barbarism. Russia has assaulted the people of Ukraine repeatedly:  Baturyn 1708 ,  Slovo House 1932 ,  Holodomor 1933 , and  Lviv 1941 , today  Bucha . I had the honor to participate in an international Zoom gatherin...