Birthday Poem (working title 1)

The shyest sparrow's supplications in the early evening trees

are a careful arpeggio - each note liberates a flotilla of leaves
fleeting, indeed, left scattered as archipelago in a dew-grass sea  

this poem continues line by line from April 3 to April 17 2012 

see April 10 posting for the next update and April 17 for the final post

by Melissa Green, Claire Beynon, Saradha Koirala so far ... more to come

Editor: Mary McCallum, TP co-curator

Tuesday Poem is two years old, and to celebrate we're writing another global poem. Twenty-six of our 31 poets living in six countries and 12 different cities will contribute a line each over 14 days to create it.

The global birthday poem kicks off at one minute past midnight on April 3, 2012 with a line from Boston poet Melissa Green - who also celebrates a birthday on April 3. Co-curator Claire Beynon (a New Zealander but currently in Ibiza, Spain) contributes the second line ten hours later, with Saradha Koirala from Wellington New Zealand posting at 6pm NZ time. The next day, it's Janice Freegard of Wellington in the morning and T Clear of Seattle in the evening, and on it goes until Tuesday April 17 when I post the final line and add a title.

The posts will be twice a day, usually around 8 am and 6 pm NZ Time, with some variations either side. Go to our global poem page to see who posts when and how, and remember to pop back to see how the poem unfolds and to cheer us on. Here's our first birthday poem, Tuesday.

Yes, Tuesday Poem is two years old. It began here on April 13 2010 after a casual start with a bunch of poets on my blog O Audacious Book , and has been posting every week since, bar a couple of weeks off over summer. Our Tuesday Poets take turns to be editor, and this involves selecting a poem, getting permission to run it, and writing up a response. It's that personal choice and response which, we believe, makes our posts so interesting and engaging for readers. Each of our poets also posts a Tuesday Poem each week on his or her own blog -- their own poems and poems they admire written by others. Look to the sidebar for those.

We have had so many wonderful poets and postings this year we can't begin to list the 'best of'. Fellow curator Claire Beynon and I bow deeply to the wonder of this - that a bunch of 30 poets (31 in fact) from six countries can work together to produce something so exciting, so profound, so community, so poetry and with so few hitches. Claire lives in Dunedin, I live in Wellington, and we've only met once ever, but we email, we talk by phone, and mostly TP progresses effortlessly giving poets and poems a platform and celebrating poetry in all its guises.

Our thanks to all our Tuesday Poets - including those who are on sabbatical or are in the alumni file - and to our guest editors, and all our followers and supporters. Reel through our posts - use the search in the sidebar - click on our Tuesday Poets sites - and see what it is we have here.

Nga mihi -

Happy Birthday -

Mary McCallum and Claire Beynon (curators)