I had something of a haiku moment: sitting by the side of a trail and watching the grass bend in the wind. I felt like maybe I should learn some more haiku, but then I decided that the feeling of needing more is probably antithetical to what I was feeling at the time.

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It's the day after the last day of classes for the semester, and so I chose this poem about offices and businesses. I think it's funny that my students think that they are the only ones who are glad at the end of a term. Recorded on the Little Baldy trail, which my children will probably think is a funny and appropriate name considering the state of my scalp.

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Recorded in the rain, but under a pavilion. You can hear both the river and the car traffic near me. This is such a great poem, however, that I didn't want to wait, but I did skip a critical part of the analysis: that's what I get for doing it in one take and without notes. Check the website for details about what I skipped.

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Recorded at about 5:00pm, not so coincidentally, for obvious reasons.  For a number of years I somehow mixed up this poem with Francisco Goya's painting "The Third of May, 1808" which isn't about bullfighting at all, but rather about the Spanish Civil War. Even now, there's some weird overlap in my head, that I still imagine the (totally unrelated) painting with this poem. There are worse things, I suppose.

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Recorded on the Dry Canyon trail, just sitting down on a rock. This is perhaps the most popular poem that I've read on Lucky Words yet, but it's still not nearly as well known as it should be.

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Happy Easter, everyone! For this Sabbath holiday I've chosen a holy sonnet by John Donne. This poem is about Jesus' second coming rather than his atoning sacrifice, so I guess it's not a perfect Easter poem, but it's still pretty close. It's in the right ballpark. This is recorded while sitting on a tree over a stream, and there's a lot of water noise in the background. It might not make great audio, but it was a fun place to record.

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It's a little weird for me to read this poem about race and America, but that's not stopping me. Just a short episode today, recorded on the Curley Springs trail.

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Longest episode yet, but in part because it's a longish poem. And I barely scratch the surface here. We could easily spend an hour on this one alone and just start digging in. But you don't need that much time to start to appreciate it. And on a lovely Good Friday, you'll be a better person after reading this poem. Recorded while hiking up Dry Canyon, above Lindon, Utah.

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You could stop listening at 4:45 if you want just the standard experience, or you can keep listening beyond for a special bonus (*bonus!*) story that kinda-sorta-almost relates to the poem. It's a personal story, and it makes me laugh, but no guarantees that it'll have the same effect on you. I'd be curious: do you have any good fruit-related stories to share? Visit luckywords.squarespace.com and let me know.

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Recorded while I was unwilling to hike any further up the snowcovered and avalanche-prone Mount Timpanogos. I love the trail, but I don't want to get caught in a avalanche, and I've seen them from too close up there in the past. So I recorded this podcast about a great modernist poem.

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