This April is the 24th National Poetry Month, a celebration established and organized by the Academy of American Poets.  Throughout the month, there are a number of specific events including Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 18, and the Dear Poet project.  Every school day this month, the King Street Chronicle will publish one poem in honor of National Poetry Month.  

Broken Shell
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Cease searching for the perfect shell, the whole
Inviolate form no tooth of time has cracked;
The alabaster armor still intact
From sand’s erosion and the breaker’s roll.
What can we salvage from the ocean’s strife
More lovely than these skeletons that lie
Like scattered flowers open to the sky,
Yet not despoiled by their consent to life?
The pattern on creation morning laid,
By softened lip and hollow, unbetrayed;
The gutted frame endures, a testament,
Even in fragment, to that first intent.
Look at this spiral, stripped to polished nerve
Of growth.  Erect as compass in its curve,
It swings forever to the absolute,
Crying out beauty like a silver flute.
Contributed by Upper School Art Teacher Mrs. Paula Westcott
– Sydney Kim, Opinions Editor
Featured Image by Sydney Kim ’20