Celebrate the first national Poem In Your Pocket Day!

The idea is simple: select a poem you love during National Poetry Month then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends on April 17.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find out about it until well past half-way through the day … but still, in honour of:

A NOISELESS PATIENT SPIDER

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres
        to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor
        hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

  — Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892), American poet and essayist.

ELEGY

Do not look for him
In brittle mountain streams:
They are too cold for any god;
And do not examine the angry rivers
For shreds of his soft body
Or turn the shore stones for his blood;
But in the warm salt ocean
He is descending through cliffs
Of slow green water
And the hovering coloured fish
Kiss his snow-bruised body
And build their secret nests
In his fluttering winding-sheet.

  — Leonard Cohen (b. 1934), Canadian poet, composer, author

THE CHANGING LIGHT

The changing light
                 at San Francisco
       is none of your East Coast light
                none of your
                            pearly light of Paris
The light of San Francisco
                        is a sea light
                                       an island light
And the light of fog
                   blanketing the hills
          drifting in at night
                      through the Golden Gate
                                       to lie on the city at dawn
And then the halcyon late mornings
       after the fog burns off
            and the sun paints white houses
                                    with the sea light of Greece
                 with sharp clean shadows
                       making the town look like
                                it had just been painted

But the wind comes up at four o’clock
                                     sweeping the hills

And then the veil of light of early evening

And then another scrim
                  when the new night fog
                                        floats in
And in that vale of light
                      the city drifts
                                    anchorless upon the ocean

From How to Paint Sunlight by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Copyright © 2000 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Leaning into the Afternoons

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.

The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.

  — Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973), Chilean writer and Communist politician.
     Translation by W.S. Merwin