Tomorrow, April 26th is national Poem in Your Pocket Day. The idea is to carry a poem in your back pocket to share with family and friends and co-workers. The poem in my pocket will be Jane Kenyon's, "What Came to Me".  I used the poem in a writing exercise today in class and my students came up with some of the most emotionally charged writing I've ever heard from an exercise. (You might try the exercise yourself.)

Here's what I asked them to think about: some event of great sadness or great joy that they didn't fully feel at the time, but later an object or a smell, sound or sight touched off the emotion for them. Then I read the poem and they wrote for five minutes.

Here's the poem: (with a formatting problem, it should be single spaced.)

"What Came to Me"   by Jane Kenyon

I took the last

dusty piece of china

out of the barrel.

It was your gravy boat,

with a hard, brown

drop of gravy still

on the porcelain lip.

I grieved for you then

as I never had before.