The sun was warm but the wind was chill/You know how it is with an April day. -- Robert Frost

April’s fresh light falls on us all, bringing bracing breezes that make the world shake out anew.

Poets bring their best game to April, which is National Poetry Month. Let’s not let it go by without saying hi.

The Bard’s birthday is April 23. His First Folio just turned 400 years old. William Shakespeare perhaps penned the changing faces of April best: “The uncertain glory of an April day!”

Uncertain, oh yes, Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon. The April wind suddenly swept you away.

Uncertainty faces us, writ large, as House Republicans look a looming global economic crisis in the face. The word “cavalier” never fit so well.

Led by new Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., caught up in power struggles, the House Republicans appear ready to let the United States default on the nation’s debt.

If they do, the Treasury’s sterling record on “full faith and credit” would crack and jeopardize the well-being of the world economy.

This falling off a financial cliff has never happened before.

All Congress has to do is follow custom and raise the debt ceiling cleanly, with no conditions. The matter has nothing to do with credit cards, as McCarthy says.

The speaker is insisting on serious concessions in President Joe Biden’s policies and budgets.

But a key reason why the debt ceiling needs lifting is because of Republicans’ $2 trillion tax cut, which benefited businesses and the wealthy.

McCarthy of Bakersfield is new to his post. So is the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., of Brooklyn. They joust in verbal battles, but this is their first donnybrook, without experience or seasoning.

The stakes are as high as they can be in the hot House. The Senate leaders may bring cooler heads to the coming clash.

You may wonder why T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month” in “The Wasteland,” a masterpiece of modern civilization crumbling. Written in the wake of the deadly First World War, when Eliot lived in London, the poem speaks of collective loss and memory.

Actually, the two greatest American presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died in April (1865 and 1945) when their wars were about won and done.

Lincoln was the first to die by murder. The Lincolns entered a buoyant theater, the crowd elated at the end of the Civil War. Lincoln was laughing in the instant he was shot. Roosevelt died of a stroke, exhausted after 12 years as president in wartime and the Depression.

Those were the cruelest Aprils as Americans wept and mourned these beloved leaders. The young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was tragically slain the fourth of April 1968. More grief and a river of tears.

So, Eliot may have it right, seen in that light.

Yet upbeat Biden seems to think April brings the luck of the Irish to his campaigns. Not a Lincoln or a Roosevelt, just Joe, he announced his run for reelection just as he did four Aprils ago. (rhymes!)

Avuncular Biden calms our collective nerves, still fraught from the pandemic and the ugly riot wrought by Trump. I was there, trapped in that siege.

Yes, Biden’s old, but he passed major laws on climate and prescription drugs. With a good heart, he’s trying to mend broken places in our body politic.

Then I found more meeting places between poetry and politics: “Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled / Here once the embattled farmers stood / and fired the shot heard round the world.”

That was the early Revolutionary War battle of Concord. Thanks to its sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Paul Revere’s legendary ride happened the night before, as poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his classic: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere / on the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five...”

Cruel or not, April stands out as eventful, a time to begin or end after huddling in winter.

Poet Sara Teasdale foreshadows her end: “Bright April / Shakes out her raindrenched hair.”

In diamond prose, George Orwell summed up a few cruel springs I’m trying to forget: “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Jamie Stiehm may be reached at JamieStiehm. com. Follow her on Twitter @JamieStiehm. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.