I hope you find these apt, and capable of serving two ends–a celebration of good poetry, a reflection on 100 days.

1. Days— Philip Larkin

What are days for?Days are where we live.They come, they wake usTime and time over.They are to be happy in:Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that questionBrings the priest and the doctorIn their long coatsRunning over the fields.

2. Sonnet #100–William Shakespeare

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so longTo speak of that which gives thee all thy might?Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song,Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?Return, forgetful Muse, and straight redeemIn gentle numbers time so idly spent;Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteemAnd gives thy pen both skill and argument.Rise, resty Muse, my love’s sweet face survey,If Time have any wrinkle graven there;If any, be a satire to decay,And make Time’s spoils despised every where.Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life;So thou prevent’st his scythe and crooked knife.

3. Of Politics & Art–Norman Dubie

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsulaThe winter stormOff the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.Mrs. Whitimore, dyingOf tuberculosis, said it would be after darkBefore the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous momentOf sea huntingSome men in an open boat suddenly found themselvesAt the still and protected centerOf a great herd of whalesWhere all the females floated on their sidesWhile their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalersJust stared into what they allowedWas the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow’sOne visible eyeball.And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman sayThat Melville mightBe taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, “And why not?”The first responded, “Because there areNo women in his one novel.”

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.There was a blue light on her face, breasts, and arms.Sometimes a whole civilization can be dyingPeacefully in one young woman, in a small heated roomWith thirty childrenRapt, confident and listening to the pureGod-rendering voice of a storm.