April is National Poetry Month!

To celebrate National Poetry Month this year, James Blevins, the Gazette’s in-house reporter and poet—who has seen his work previously published in “Salt Hill Journal,” “Pretty Owl Poetry,” “Stoneboat Journal,” “Mud Season Review” and “AZURE,” as well as numerous other outlets both online and in print—has elected to pick five poems for publication, one for each Friday in April, concluding with a poem of his own on April 29.

At the Spring Dawn

By Angelina Weld Grimké

I watched the dawn come,

Watched the spring dawn come.

And the red sun shouldered his way up

Through the grey, through the blue,

Through the lilac mists.

The quiet of it! The goodness of it!

And one bird awoke, sang, whirred

A blur of moving black against the sun,

Sang again—afar off.

And I stretched my arms to the redness of the sun,

Stretched to my finger tips,

And I laughed.

Ah! It is good to be alive, good to love,

At the dawn,

At the spring dawn.

Angelina Weld Grimké, born in Boston on February 27, 1880, was a journalist, playwright and poet from the Harlem Renaissance, an intellectual and cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s in New York City. Her work was collected in “Negro Poets and Their Poems” (The Associated Publishers, 1923) and “The New Negro” (Atheneum, 1925). She died on June 10, 1958.