By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
BATTERY PARK CITY — James Walsh, 43, a construction worker, took a bookmark-sized card from a Poets House worker Thursday as he was getting his lunch in the World Financial Center.
On it was written "The Sacred History of the Earth," by G.E. Patterson.
The larkspur blossoms
know when they open themselves
the bee will not say.
He shrugged.
“Poems, why not?” said Walsh, who is building the 9/11 Memorial. “If you can make people happy, why not? We’ve got enough freaky things to bring us down.”
For the eighth annual Poem in Your Pocket Day, workers from Poets House — a poetry library based in Battery Park City — fanned out to hand out cards to commuters, joggers and the lunchtime crowds in the Thursday neighborhood, including at the World Financial Center and the TriBeCa Whole Foods.
Some people smiled, others were surprised and still more responded with blank stares.
“The message is: There’s something in poetry for everyone,” said Lee Briccetti, executive director of Poets House.
Adults received poems from “Black Nature,” an anthology of four centuries of African-American nature poems.
Children got “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, a poem of made-up words that originally appeared in “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.”
The poem opens:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
The mayor’s office also solicited verses for Poem in Your Pocket day via Twitter. The tweeters faced a constraint that certainly would have cramped Homer’s style: All Twitter poems are limited to 140 characters.
Briccetti hopes those who receive poems will stash them, and discover them again weeks or months later. She had a similar moment last August, when she was contemplating her 20th anniversary of working for Poets House.
“By some weird chance, I was going through my wallet, and I pulled out a poem I had in my pocket,” Briccetti said.
The Emily Dickinson poem, which Briccetti had copied onto a scrap of paper, ends with the lines:
This gave me the precarious gait
Some call experience.
“It changed my whole day just to read it,” Briccetti said. “It was like a message in a bottle that spoke directly to me. That’s what we hope: That you can find something that really moves you.”
