It is St. Patrick’s Day, maybe your birthday too, or a birthday of someone you once loved and lost. It could even be your due date, and you are now wondering, if you are in labor, do I give him or her (you probably already know the gender) an Irish name, or not, and if so, should it be the kind that is easy to spell, like Maggie or Liam, or the other kind of Irish name, like Siobhan or Cian?
Then there is the wordcraft of three-year-old Silvia Rose Lynch, a Tlingit, Irish, Gypsy child, who just last night corrected me when I said her father has gone off fishing, because that his job. “He is catching crabs” she said. “What kind?” I asked, “King crab or dungeness?” “Queen crabs,” she said. “And princess crabs.”
Which is all the sorts of things that I bet Billy Collins could put in a poem and make you smile, and that is why today, I share his poetry, for this new day dawning, in more ways than one, for each of us– you know?
(From his poem “Aristotle”)
“This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
― Billy Collins
