Poem in a Pocket Day

Today, April 29, New Yorkers are encouraged to carry a poem in their pocket and share it with those around them. It's popular in the school system and the New York Times will be publishing poems this week.
I'm going to share three poems with you.

This beautiful poem is called

Fictional Characters

by Danusha Lame'ris, published in The Sun, November 2009.

Do they ever want to escape?
Climb out of the curved white pages
and enter our world?

Holden Caulfield slipping in the side door
of the movie theater to catch the two o'clock.
Anna Karenina sitting in the local diner,
reading the paper as the waitress
in a bright green uniform
serves up a cheeseburger and a Coke.

Even Hector, on break from the Iliad,
takes a stroll through the park,
admires a fresh bed of tulips.

Who knows? Maybe
they were growing tired
of the author's mind,
all its twists and turns,

or they were finally weary
of stumbling around Pamplona,
a bottle in each fist,
eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile.

Perhaps it was just too hot
in the small California town
where they'd been written into
a lifetime of plowing fields.

Whatever the reason, here they are,
content to spend the day
roaming the city streets, rain falling
on their phantasmal shoulders,
enjoying the bustle of the crowd.

Wouldn't you, if you could?
Step out of your own story
to lean for an afternoon against the doorway
of the five-and-dime, sipping your coffee,

your life somewhere far behind you,
all its heat and toil nothing but a tale
resting in the hands of a stranger,
the dingy sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.

The other two poems are written by "two undiscovered geniuses" (their words) that live with my husband and me.

I have a turtle.
His name is Murtle.
He has a friend, Fred.
The turtle every morning, Fred, has to take his meds.
Every morning, Murtle is just a regular turtle.


THE SUBWAY STATION

I swipe my card through the slot.
I walk down the stairs,
all faces staring down at me.
I think, "all alone with my mother in my home."
I step in the train as it comes.
When it leaves, I hear the train give off its' loud hums.
Tons of people, listening to music, as oblivious as ever.
They probably wouldn't notice if they were nicked by a feather.

Write or read a poem today.