It's always a good time to exercise your brain in a different way. I started memorizing poetry while in high school just for the fun of it. Some I found motivat

It's always a good time to exercise your brain in a different way. I started memorizing poetry while in high school just for the fun of it. Some I found motivational, some just silly - Jabberwocky almost broke me. Whitman - that man knew how to live. My favorite of all remains Poe's The Raven. It was the Simpson's shortened take on that poem that first drew my attention, but man, did Poe know how to tell a story, and the meter! Such a rhythm, such a beat that man had. In learning other languages one of the greatest challenges of all is to understand their poetry. Pushkin, Lermontov in their original are treasures. If only I could understand them all without always keeping my dictionary handy. It is always wonderful to find a poet's expressions when they have chosen a different way to say what I'm thinking. Mary Oliver's Summer Day is just a celebration of the wonders of life. Also, this stuff is a great source of passwords. Nobody puts words together the way poets do.