It's Poem In Your Pocket Day

Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. What a fitting way to complete National Poetry Month! To learn more about this poetic celebration visit Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets.

For my literary contribution, I have selected something I wrote several years ago when my three kids were tinier.  Middle daughter has always been joyously tactile in her appreciation of God's creation and the little corners of it that she gets to co create within.

small sacraments of a daughter
by T. F. Silva

In the bathroom:

a paper cup, a plastic spoon,

a pool of puddled water poured

into a small pond upon the tiled floor.

In the hallway:

patches of damp carpet

places where your tipping vessel

(a teapot? a cereal bowl? a purse?)

required more balance than your tip

toed passage could provide.

In the playroom

I see without seeing:

a tabletop of lids and cups

boxes and tins

and you apportioning

dispensing each to each

in splashy messy wonder.

If I called out, "Emily?"

the silence would still speak

of you, bottom lip puckered,

half pushed out, anxiously

hoping for the transparency

of your non reply.

Aquarian maiden, water princess,

pour forth your liquid generosity

Cana-like, plentiful,

splattery passionate,

and leave for me the privilege

of the cleaning up.

And now, a word from a master:

Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Glory be to God for dappled things-- For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.

So - happy Poem in Your Pocket Day! A couple of my favorite poetry sites are the above referenced Poets.org and former National Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry.