First we took our daughters to work, then our children, then our dogs. Last year the good folks at Tweetspeak Poetry instituted a new holiday: Take Your Poet to Work Day. (If you’re on Twitter, you can follow along at #poettowork.)
I printed my coloring book this weekend and chose a poet—Langston Hughes. I have not yet cut him out and attached him to a popsicle stick, but that will be done by Wednesday, July 16.
I chose him because I remembered a poem of his I’d printed 10 years ago after I saw it illustrated in a “Herb and Jamal” comic strip.
Dream Dust
Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
Storm-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
Not for sale.
Langston Hughes
Wow. That’s even better than I remembered. I once wrote a poem about hail but it lacked the crucial word “splinters.”
Mr. Hughes won’t be traveling far to reach my workplace—just to my back porch where I edit. It’s quite dusty right now. I thought it was from all the dirt the puppies dug up, but perhaps there’s some star-dust in there, too. There’s plenty of storm-dust.
I drink tea while I work, but Mr. Hughes doesn’t seem like a tea-drinking guy. I’ll pour him a cup of coffee and stick him in that. If he has any other drink requests, I’ll let you know.
Stay tuned for photos and poem snippets on Wednesday!