Please hold your comments for the moment as I’m being comment-bombed today and am receiving about a comment a minute. That’s a little too high-maintenance for me, so I’ve turned commenting off until these spammers take their toys and go bother someone else’s blog (hopefully not yours).

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Last year Reya at Grace’s Poppies put a call out for bloggers to publish poetry on Feb. 2. This year Deborah at Roots Down suggested we continue the tradition. I’m still trying to get out of December, so it was with some surprise that I stumbled across the fact that today is the day at Amanda’s blog at Clothesknit.

Suzanne at Luscious Fibers reminds me that I am remiss in multiple categories of blogging responsibility because today is Go Red for Women Day, when the American Heart Association hopes to raise awareness of the fact that heart disease is the number one killer of women. Not only did I not wear red today but I also don’t have any red photos posted online yet where I can link to them.

I work in health literacy and lost my paternal grandmother to heart disease, so I’m particularly upset about the latter slip.

So I figured I’d better tie them together in some way.

Believe it or not, I can do it.

I found this article, published two years ago by the American Physiological Society: “Reading Hexametric Rhyme Supports Cardiac Synchronization, Especially After A Heart Attack.”

The gist of the study is that European scientists found that by reading poetry written in dactylic hexameter aloud helps resynchronize your heart beat, particularly after a heart attack. Cool, huh? (Dactylic hexameter is poetry in which each line can be divided into seven sections that have an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllable — BUM ba ba, BUM ba ba.)

Unfortunately, hexameter is hard to come by in English (we prefer pentameter, the rhythm of Shakespeare) and dactylic hexameter even harder. Those who wrote in it, tend, like Homer and Virgil, to have used it for long poems that are not condusive to replication in a blog post. Longfellow wrote “Evangeline,” a booklength poem in it, for example.

Since I cannot offer you a morsel that will protect your heart, I will instead offer you one that speaks to why it matters:

I started this post yesterday because I had a hard time believing it wasn’t Thursday already. But now that it actually is Thursday (which I persist in believing is Friday), I offer you three of the beautiful things I encountered last week:

1. I bought some bread at the farmers’ market over the weekend but forgot to put it in a plastic bag, so some of the crusts have gotten particularly tough. I tossed them onto the window well ledge yesterday, and today Posey and Jeremiah get to watch live bird theater from the living room window.

2. There have been problems on my Metro line the last couple days so I’ve walked to work instead of riding the rails. It’s been chilly, but nothing horrible, and by the time I get to work I feel energized and invigorated and ready to face some of the problems that come with the workday. Now if I could just convince my body to get up earlier so I can do it more often…

3. Mum made me a beautiful woolen cape when I was in college. It’s bright pink and cheerful and makes me feel like a gothic heroine whenever I wear it, regardless of my other apparel. On the way home from work on Monday night, a stranger on the Metro complimented me on it, and I got to say, “My mother made it for me.”