National Poetry Month: Poem in Your Pocket

Hello and welcome to our last post for National Poetry Month - Poem In Your Pocket Day! It was started in 2002 in New York City, and in 2008, the Academy of American Poets helped spread it to all fifty states in the US. In 2016, the League of Canadian Poets extended Poem in Your Pocket Day to Canada. 

Poem In Your Pocket Day is really just another way to share poetry. Here are some ways you can participate from the Academy of American Poets: 

• Select a poem and share it on social media using the hashtag #PocketPoem. 
• Print a poem from the Poem in Your Pocket Day PDF and draw an image from the poem in the white space, or use the instructions on pages 57-58 of the PDF to make an origami swan. 
• Record a video of yourself reading a poem, then share it on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or another social media platform you use. 
• Email a poem to your friends, family, neighbors, or local government leaders.
• Schedule a video chat and read a poem to your loved ones.
• Add a poem to your email footer.
• Read a poem out loud from your porch, window, backyard, or outdoor space. 

The poem I've chosen to share today is a new one to me from Wislawa Szymborska. It's short, sweet, and hopeful, and I hope you'll see some of those same things when you read it. 

Vermeer

by Wislawa Szymborska

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum

in painted quiet  and concentration

keeps pouring milk day after day

from the pitcher to the bowl

the World hasn't earned

the world's end.

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Szymborska, Wislawa. Map: Collected and Last Poems. Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. 

You can read more about the remarkable Wislawa Szymborska here. 

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Be sure to check in with Kym, Kat, and Sarah for more poems for your pocket today, and feel free to make others' days a little bit more poetic by sharing a poem at work, the grocery store, the bank, the post office, or around your own dinner table. (And remember that any time is good for poetry, not just Thursdays in April!)

Thanks for reading poetry with us this month and I hope you've got some poetry in your heart and mind!