It’s Poem in Your Pocket Day

I love tutoring. If I didn’t tutor, I might not have known that today is Poem in Your Pocket Day! Last night one of my sweet students did her own brave thing by reciting a memorized poem which she is sharing with the world today. She memorized the poet’s name and wrote it on every copy, too, saying, “I want to make sure I honor the poet every time.”

Do you have a poem you’ve memorized? Have you shared a poem with someone lately? Why not recite one for a friend or stranger today? Share the love, share the poetry.

Here, I’ll start (even though I haven’t memorized it all yet– I found it in a great anthology called 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins):

 

Bedecked by Victoria Redel

Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy

store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.

 

He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star

choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.

Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says

sticker earrings look too fake.

 

Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a

boy’s only a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,

battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping

off tracks into the tub.

 

Tell me it’s fine– really– maybe even a good thing– a boy

who’s got some girl to him,

and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in the park.

 

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son

who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means–

this way or that– but for the way facets set off prisms and

prisms spin up everywhere

and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows– made every shining true color.

 

Now try to tell me– man or woman– your heart was ever once

that brave.