April is National Poetry Month

Welcome to National Poetry Month! Here's a poem to start April's best festivities. For full-on poetry lovin', visit Hedgehog Lover, where it's all poetry, all month.

Piano, New York

Anywhere, like Idaho, women like our aunts
would save quarters in cups or sell pies
to buy one like this. They'd put it in a parlor
for hymns and rub it with lemon oil each week,
but here an old piano comes with the apartment,
and no one will pay movers to hoist
the beast out the window on ropes.
We think we've no choice but to saw into its side
that shines like the side of a horse.
We save the real ivory keys in shopping bags
and yank out the rack of purple felt mallets.
Behind it all is a harp, tall as the whole piano
and sprayed with gold. When wing nuts are loosened,
the strings twang then hang slack. We stop
for a moment, then rasp through its frame
with hacksaws and drag the thing, piece by piece,
down three flights of stairs to the street
where people walking by recognize—
just from its insides—a piano.

by Julia Kasdorf
from Sleeping Preacher. © Pittsburgh University Press, 1992.
Courtesy The Writer's Almanac