It's Keep a Poem in Your Pocket Day

As part of National Poetry Month, today is "Keep a Poem in Your Pocket Day."   The idea is to keep a poem in your pocket and share with others as a reminder of the ever present art and poetry of the world. Here are the poems my Youth Advisory Board passed out at school today.

Trees – Mark Haddon

They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
Some of them are taller than department stores,

yet they do not draw attention tothemselves.

You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
and see, through the louvre window,
a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction
in the air that swims above the little gardens.

Or you will wake at your aunt’s cottage,
your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill
as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.

Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,
these are accidental things.
We lost this game a long way back.
Look at you. You’re reading poetry.
Outside the spring air is thick
with the seeds of their children.

Introduction to Poetry

By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

And hold it up to the light like a color slide

Or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into the poem

And watch him probe his way out,

Or walk inside the poem’s room and

Feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water ski

Across the surface of a poem, waving

At the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

Is tie the poem to a chair with rope

And torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

To find out what it really means.

My Teacher Ate My Homework

By Kenn Nesbitt

My teacher ate my homework,

which I thought was rather odd.

He sniffed at it and smiled

with an approving sort of nod.

He took a little nibble --

it's unusual, but true --

then had a somewhat larger bite

and gave a thoughtful chew.

I think he must have liked it,

for he really went to town.

He gobbled it with gusto

and he wolfed the whole thing down.

He licked off all his fingers,

gave a burp and said, "You pass."

I guess thats how they grade you

when you're in a cooking class.

The Rose That Grew From Concrete

By Tupac Shakur

Did you hear about the rose that grew

from a crack in the concrete?

Proving nature's law is wrong it

learned to walk with out having feet.

Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,

it learned to breathe fresh air.

Long live the rose that grew from concrete

when no one else ever cared.