Our music notes give you a sense of what we’re after:

After D.H. Lawrence fish poem, ending, “In the beginning Jesus was called the Fish and in the end,” we hear van Morrison, And It Stoned Me. 

Right after Billy Collins’ poem about fish on his plate, “it began to stare up at me with its one flat iridescent eye,” we hear Taj Mahal, I’m  a going fishing, my baby’s going fishing too.

After the poem, “The Wind Blows Through My Heart,” by Deborah Digges, we hear Blackberry Winter, Connie Ellisor.

After we talk about National Parks and Yosemite’s twin valley, Hetch Hetchy, we hear about “Resurrection Enginnering,” followed by Withered Hand, New Gods.  

After Robert Burns, “The Banks of the Devon,” we hear a “new year” song by this poet, Auld Lang Syne.

..When we hear how “a child will find history a story of redemption,” we hear Leonard Cohen, Halleluiah. 

Last song at closing Rumi poems, “A House for the Naked,” and “Like Sunlight Upon the Earth,” Eric Clapton, Sunshine of Your Love, Cream

In just Spring–when the world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful, in e.e. cummings’ paean to Spring, and his “i who have died am alive again today/and this is the sun’s birthday, and this is the birth/ day of life, and love, and of wings, and of the gay/ great happening illimitably earth,” on this Easter Sunday, on our Poetry Slow Down, radiomonterey.com, I’m your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, with Producer Zappa Johns, so excited to be with you in this wild and wet time of year, drenched and falling down and rising up, rivers and mountains, flowers, hearts . . . there are floods and blossoms, it’s tremendous transitions . . . we’ll hear poems dripping and muddy that have gone fishing and been gardening, A.K. Rallings, D.H. Lawrence, Billy Collins, Hafiz, Melanie Waters, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke, W.S. Merwirn, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Deborah Digges, Charles Tripi, Alva Havard, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Zeeya Aspandiar,  Robert Burns, Sarah Hovet, Emily Dickinson, and your host chime in (hear hear!). I love these poems–awed and humbled to be reading their silky rambunctiousness, their hopeful earnest visions of what is possible for us–in Merwin’s words, it’s not too late . . . if we pay attention. These poems are all about paying attention!