Poems for your pocket

It's Poem in You Pocket Day. Do you have one? Feel free to take these, if you want them -- and leave some for me, here.


This first one I found posted outside the office of a wonderful Shakespeare professor, while visiting my son's future college these past few days:

            The Revised Versions

Even Samuel Johnson found that ending

unbearable, and for over a hundred years

Lear was allowed to live, along with Cordelia

who marries Edgar, who tried so hard

to do the right thing. Don’t they deserve

some happiness, after all that suffering?

So Antony keeps his temper, takes Cleaopatra

aside to say: no more games, dear,

we need to talk this through. And Hamlet?

Send him back to school to learn

no one ever really pleases his father.

And while he’s reading he’ll remember

how pretty Ophelia was, how much

she admired his poems. It’s not easy

being king, having to worry every day

about the ambitions of your friends.

Who needs a bigger castle?

Let’s sleep on it, Macbeth might tell his wife,

wait and see what comes along.

And Othello should have a friend to explain

it’s natural for newlyweds to quarrel,

especially if the bride is so much younger.

Why not make what you can of love?

It’s what we want for ourselves,

anxious to avoid another scene, and wary

of starting a fight, having suffered

through too many funerals and heard

how eloquently the dead are praised,

who threw their lives away.

                        - Lawrence Raab

And this one is one I wrote a year or three ago:

     NEED

I just spent an hour

and two hundred dollars

in the grocery store

I came home with bananas 

and no milk which is what I needed

but with a memory

that a friend once spent 

two hundred dollars

on a car

true, it had no floor 

and no brakes

but he was young and it was a car

and he had places to go

and no need yet for a floor

or milk, or brakes

Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) had some good advice re poetry for writers: 

Write a verse a day. Not to send to publishers but to throw in wastebaskets. It will help your prose. It will give it swing.

I think reading them is pretty useful, too. And having one in your pocket seems just plain prudent. Like having a tissue, or a mint, maybe some floss. Because what if you need one?

So -- got a poem to share, your own or a favorite by someone else?

Love,

Rachel Vail