Celebrating National Poetry Month: #23

A favorite anthology of poetry I love is called Celebrate America in Poetry in Art. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution edited by Nora Panzer

This book takes American poetry selections and matches them with American art into a visual and poetic tribute to our country. Here is one sample from the book:

painting is Cowboy Dance by Jenne Magafan

The Wheel
For Robert Penn Warren

At the first strokes of the fiddle bow
the dances rise from their seats.
The dance begins to shape itself
in the crowd, as couples join,
and couples join couples, their movement
together lightening their feet.
They move in the ancient circle
of the dance. The dance and the song
call each other into being. Soon
they are one-rapt in a single
rapture, so that even the night
has its clarity, and time
is the wheel that brings it round.
In this rapture the dead return.
Sorrow is gone from them.
They are light. They step
into the steps of the living
and turn with them in the dance
in the sweet enclosure
of the song, and timeless
is the wheel that brings it round.

-Wendell Berry