Poem in Your Pocket

I'll bet you didn't know it was National Poetry Month, did you? Put a poem in your pocket today in honor of Poem in Your Pocket Day.

(Since I didn't give you much notice, you can do it tomorrow, too.)

Take your poem out throughout the day and share it with your colleagues, your neighbors, your family. Come on, do it. It'll be fun.

I chose the poem I'm putting in my pocket in honor of my mom and in memory of my grandmother, Libby. This might be my mom's favorite poem. She had a copy of it on paper that had turned brown with age, in a tarnished frame, hanging on the wall in her kitchen. I think it used to belong to Libby.

Joyce Kilmer. 1886–1918

119. Trees

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Let me know what poem you put in your pocket, and why you chose it. We all need a little more poetry in our mundane lives, don't we?

Eat All the Sugar You Can Get

My grandmother--we called her by her middle name, Libby--was a stubborn, independent character. She lived alone in a Philadelphia row house until she was 96, when her children finally insisted that she move to an assisted living facility.

At that point she was subsisting on angel food cake and cat food. She'd forget to wash her thick, waist-length hair for months at a time; it was bound up in a greasy, tangled bun on the back of her head. Dust and cat hair coated every surface in her two-level home. My parents' Hollywood-style wedding photograph sat on the same cherry end-table where it had gathered dust for the past 35 years.

(BTW, I love that old photo. My parents look like movie stars, with perfect skin and touched-up cheekbones. My mom's wedding dress was simple and elegant: an off-the-rack street dress with covered buttons and a matching fabric belt cinching her tiny waist.)

The kitchen surfaces were coated with grease from the Jurassic Period, and crops were growing in the bathtub. I don't know how her adult children allowed it to get so bad, nor am I passing judgment on them. But my sibs and I swore we would not let the situation with our own parents reach the same level of ick.

Libby named her cats Barry and Goldy after that Republican spitfire who famously said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue" when he accepted the 1964 nomination for president. Barry and Goldy happily chased mice and snacked on angel food crumbs while Libby read large-print Readers' Digests and watched soaps on a tiny black-and-white TV precariously balanced on an old TV tray.

Libby had a philosophy of longevity that she'd pronounce loudly every time we'd take her out to eat. "Eat all the sugar you can get!" she'd holler, and heads would turn. "That's my motto--and I'm 96!" She also loved butter, and only ate vegetables that had every last vestige of nutrition blanched right out of them.

Libby lived a non-traditional, opinionated life. She firmly believed that she had pulled herself up by her own bootstraps, and had no respect for anyone who didn't do the same. She died in a nursing home at age 98, with my mom holding her hand. I like to imagine that her last words were, "Eat all the sugar you can get!"