In celebration of National Poetry Month, the entire campus community is invited to join the Campus Poetry Project sponsored by the English, Foreign Languages and English as a Second Language Department.
Throughout April, be on the lookout for poetry postings in the Campus Chronicle and on digital monitors across campus, as well as our cardboard poet cutouts and poetry lawn signs. Take a selfie with your favorite poet!
This year, the American Academy of Poets is highlighting this verse: “we were all made for something” (Ada Limon). That is why we decided to focus on poems about work this year. We’ll include songs and lyrics about work, too! (Below is the official 2023 National Poetry Month poster from the American Academy of Poets.)
Also, 
please click here for a link to 30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month in the classroom (or anywhere).
Today’s Poem
“This Work”
by Martha Zweig
The cold orange hands of the
salamanders still wrap and
unwrap the baby he dreams he was
then long before there was any human family.
Then their work was just beginning on the
damp stones and mosses too.
He had to be as little strange as
possible. They were
making the world & working on him too. He
was warmer but less
strange than a moss or a stone
was, that saved him.
The moss worked on the stone too.
The stone worked
on him like a mind he
had to grow up to talk to or
dream to but without
turning strange. The
cold hands run over him.
They read the body he
dreams of as a baby’s to the
stone. Before there was any
human family the work that made him was
this work just beginning.
From “What Kind” by Martha Zweig. Copyright © 2003 by Martha Zweig. Reproduced by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.
Martha Zweig is the author of “Monkey Lightning” (Tupelo Press, 2010), “What Kind: (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), and “Vinegar Bone” Wesleyan University Press, 1999). She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award. She lives in Vermont.