NPM: Day 18

This link has been on my desktop for a while. It's a photography project, where a mom takes pictures of the contents of her preschool son's pockets each day. I love this idea, and each of the photos could spark a poem.

Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. In other years I've written poems for my pocket (here's last year's post). At the Poets.org link, you can find some poems to print out to put in your pocket this year.

This year I wrote a haibun (or halibut, as helpfully autocorrected by TextEdit) about something else I frequently find in my pocket. (If the idea of a haibun is new to you, as it fairly recently was to me, here's Wikipedia's explanation. Basically it's a short prose piece ending in a haiku. They aren't new - they've been around since the seventeenth century!) I often keep a hoodie in my classroom for when the air conditioning gets too cold, and one of these is usually in that pocket. On Friday at school I had another in my pants pocket.

Prayers in my Pocket: A haibun

Ladies from the church knitted squares of yarn and as they knitted, they prayed. If you gathered them up and sewed them all together, they would be a blanket to wrap yourself in on a cold day, but instead they put them in a basket with a sign saying “Take one.” You could hold yours in your hand and remember that it was full of prayers. My daughter knew I was sad, so she got two for me, and I carried them in my pockets.

“There’s nothing magic about it,” I explained to a friend and counselor. “It’s not a good-luck charm or anything like that. It’s just that it reminds me that people are praying for me and I feel less forgotten.”

She laughed, amused at my earnest theological concerns. “I’m Catholic, so I don’t have to worry about things like that,” she said. She encouraged me to hold on for dear life.

Deep in my pocket
Fingers find tiny afghan
Stitches of comfort


Today's line for the Progressive Poem is here.