Let’s Celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day Tomorrow

 

To all my lovely readers, friends, and random stumblers-upon,

Have you mostly been sitting behind a screen this month, scrolling through poems in isolation and then moving on with your day? Do your friends not know you actually like poetry? Has one line of verse been haunting, confusing, or delighting you for weeks?

How about you invite others to share in that experience with you for a day? Please join me tomorrow, Thursday April 24th, in celebrating one of my favorite not-actual-but-should-be-official holidays, Poem in Your Pocket Day.

The “rules” of celebrating this day, which falls towards the end of National Poetry Month, are pretty simple. Put a poem in your pocket. You got that part already. Now you can’t just let it fester there all day. Read it to a friend over lunch, startle your coworkers at a meeting, recite one to somebody before bed. Or if you’d rather share quietly, slip some verse into the pocket of a loved one, leave one at a cafe table, or print out dozens of poems, as I did many years ago, and plaster them all over your dorm walls. Disrupt the ritual of people’s days with beautiful words.

And, if you are so inclined, please comment with the poems you decide to share. My pockets are ready to be filled.*

(* This is the same text I used last year. Apologies for taking this blogging shortcut, but I figured there was no point reinventing the wheel on this!)

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Words that wait are dark as shadows

A short but lingering poem from Linda Pastan (1932-).

 

“In Back Of”

“I’m looking for things back of remarks that are said . . . ”
–William Stafford

In back of “I love you”
stands “goodbye.”
In back of
“goodbye”
stands “it was lovely
there in the grass, drenched
in so much green
together.”
Words that wait
are dark as shadows
in the back rooms
of mirrors:
when you raise
your right hand
in greeting,
they raise their left
in farewell.