Over the past month, I engaged in a personal challenge to ride my bike each day, take at least one picture during my ride, and find a poem that somehow encapsulated the day.

Poetry has always held a special place for me, but over the years our relationship became distant. I saw it as extra, even pretentious, and my reading shifted to consist mostly of non-fiction prose.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I pledged to 30 Days of Biking this month because it reminds me to see the novelty in the familiar routes I travel in Washington, D.C. I’m not a photographer, but over the years I have enjoyed having a camera at the ready to capture moments by bike. The bicycle is a lovely muse, and the flowering city in April a spectacular backdrop.

I took scenic ways to and from work this month, as I sought additional visual variety in my rides. Knowing at least one of my rides each day would also have a poem attached to it prompted unexpected thoughts about the feelings those spaces evoked and how they mirrored or contrasted my own head space at any given moment.

There were times I would spy a calm nook in the city during a relaxed moment of riding. Other times I was mashing agitatedly around town and a spot would call to me because it was the contrast I needed.

Combing through poems was a wonderful treat. It was then when I actively contemplated how the physical environment and my disposition during a ride fit together.

This month, I thought a lot about my relationship with the city. I pondered whether spring’s vivaciousness is more illusory than transient. I mulled the limitations of language as a form of expression.

Some readers have asked about the camera I use to take photos. Most of the time, my Samsung GS5 was my device of choice. For self-portraits, I used the phone’s self-timer propped it on my makeshift helmet tripod. There’s a trick to doing it just right.

This project took a fair bit of time and energy, but it was totally enriching and worth the effort– 30 days of biking, 730 miles, 30 photos, and 30 poems. These are the final nine days of April.

Day 22

Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee
Shall Nature cease to bow?

Thy mind is ever moving
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving—
Come back and dwell with me.
—Emily Brontë, Shall earth no more inspire thee

Day 23

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot, and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots.
The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.
—Amy Lowell, Spring Day

Day 24

To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
—John Keats, To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent

Day 25

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,
I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,
Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

Here rises the fluid and attaching character,
The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman,
(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of
themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.)

Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old,
From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,
Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.
—Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Day 26

At night we will set our poems
adrift in ginger ale bottles
each with a clamshell rudder
each with a piggyback spider
waving them off by dogstar

and nothing will come from the mainland
to tell us who cares, who cares
and nothing will come of our lovelock
except as our two hearts go soft
and black as avocado pears.
—Maxine W. Kumin, Running Away Together

Day 27

I would like to describe the simplest emotion
joy or sadness
but not as others do
reaching for shafts of rain or sun

I would like to describe a light
which is being born in me
but I know it does not resemble
any star
for it is not so bright
not so pure
and is uncertain

I would like to describe courage
without dragging behind me a dusty lion
and also anxiety
without shaking a glass full of water

to put it another way
I would give all metaphors
in return for one word
drawn out of my breast like a rib
for one word
contained within the boundaries
of my skin
—Zbigniew Herbert, I Would Like to Describe (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)

Day 28

My father had our yard cemented over.
He couldn’t tell a flower from a weed.
The neighbors let their backyards run to clover
and some grew dappled gardens from a seed,

but he preferred cement to rampant green.
Lushness reeked of anarchy’s profusion.
Better to tamp the wildness down, unseen,
than tolerate its careless brash intrusion.
—Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Cement Backyard

Day 29

and again this morning as always
I am stopped as the world comes back
wet and beautiful I am thinking
that language

is not even a river
is not a tree is not a green field
is not even a black ant traveling
briskly modestly

from day to day from one
golden page to another.
—Mary Oliver, Forty Years

Day 30

Nobody noogers the shaff of a sloo.
Nobody slimbers a wench with a winch
No higgers armed each with a niggle
and each with the flimdrat of a smee,
each the inbiddy hum of a smoo.

Then slong me dorst with the flagdarsh.
Then creep me deep with the crawbright.
Let idle winds ploodaddle the dorshes.
And you in the gold of the gloaming
You shall be sloam with the hoolriffs.

On a flimmering floom you shall ride.
They shall tell you bedish and desist.
On a flimmering floom you shall ride.
—Carl Sandburg, On a Flimmering Floom You Shall Ride