Phyllis Mcginley

I love the underrated Phyllis McGinley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1960.  The prize was controversial, because she was dismissed as a suburban housewife who wrote “light verse.” Personally, I like light verse, the more bubbly and comic the better, but there’s more to her charming poems than meets the eye.  Here is one of her lightest,  “Daylight Savings Time.”

Daylight Savings Time

We turn the clock an hour ahead;
Which means, each April that arrives,
We lose an hour out of our lives.

Who cares? When autumn birds in flocks
Fly southward, back we turn the clocks,
And so regain a lovely thing
That missing hour we lost in spring.