Tomorrow is Poem in Your Pocket day, the day when poetry is celebrated by carrying a favorite poem in your pocket and sharing it with others.  So before we left school today, my teaching partner and I gathered poems for our students to choose from and she made a darling display of pockets that we stuffed with poems and hung on the door.

And when I got home I started thinking about the poem I will carry in my pocket tomorrow.  And it’s hard…there are so many wonderful poems out there.  I love different poems for different reasons.  As I started thinking about poems I know and love, I remembered a favorite that I haven’t revisited in a while.

Valentine for Ernest Mann

by Naomi Shihab Nye
You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the off sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.
– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23872#sthash.CJvqErxc.dpuf