It's National Poetry Month here in the US (HT: Mindy, who has a helpful list of suggested ways to mark the occasion, including some ways into poetry for nervous first-timers, or previous refusers).

I shall celebrate by posting a poem on the blog every day.

Today you get two, because I missed yesterday.

No prizes for guessing why this one:

Home-thoughts, from Abroad

O to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge -
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
- Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower.

Robert Browning

And this, because it was one of the first poems I learned to recite. And even though I've since learned that Nineveh was 200 miles inland, and I'm still not exactly sure what a quinquireme looks like, it's still fun to imagine those exotic cargoes carried in their stately vessel.

Cargoes

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

John Masefield

I don't know what moidores are, either. But I do know that the Hebrew word for 'cinnamon' is 'qinamon'.