Gumball Poetry is back at St Elmo’s Del Ray this April - and also in the Fairlington St Elmo’s for the first time. Fifty cents buys you a poem written by a Del Ray poet.  The poem is folded into a capsule in the gumball machine on the counter where you buy your coffee and other goodies. (Please recycle the empty capsule in the basket next to the gumball machine.)  

 

April is National Poetry Month, and poems are blooming everywhere.  Look for the Avenue Poems along Mt Vernon Avenue and a few along Monroe Avenue in front of businesses, schools, art galleries, the Farmer’s Market.   

 

The mini poetry fence will be in the Duncan Library again, celebrating resilience with a variety of well-known and not-famous poems and poets - with illustrations that bring even more depth and meaning to the poems and, hopefully, will pull you toward the fence to read them all. Take a kids poem from the basket next to the mini fence and read it to your child when you visit the library.

 

All of this is brought to you by the Poetry Fence at the corner of Windsor and Dewitt, compliments of yours truly, Renée Adams.  This spring marks 15 years of the Poetry Fence of Del Ray.  Throughout these 15 years, people have told me they come to the fence for solace and to learn something or be inspired.  I have lovely stories about all these people through the years, and our new Duncan Library Manager, Kayla Payne, thinks I should write a book about them all and share it with you in the future.  Who knows? Maybe I will.

 

In the meantime, be sure to enjoy all the poetry spread throughout Del Ray to celebrate National Poetry Month!

            by Renée Adams

 

The leaning wooden fence holds poetry

chosen inside the nearby house from

many volumes, typed up, tacked up,

a way station to entice the passersby to stop and read.

Their dogs appreciate the time to sniff

the other dogs who’ve wended by, to question

who has been that way before,

their form of meditation while their humans stop.

It’s not a Facebook wall, no digital waves

allowing instant feedback to the poster,

no sound bytes to speak the superficial as mundane.

This analog chautauqua doesn’t snark and bark

them to agreement with pronouncements

like a cable station.  It does what all good

poetry does:  asks them, in their solitude,

to pause, to read, to think, to question, and to feel.