Q is making it easy for you to charm your sweetheart, with poetry by Ted Kooser, a former U.S. poet laureate and the winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. (For more on Kooser, check out The Guy Page, on Page 8.)
Cut out the poem below, do something artistic with it (Romance 101: Glue it to a red construction paper heart) and slip it into your beloved’s pocket (just not the one with the balled-up and used tissues).
POCKET POEM
If this comes creased and creased
again and soiled
as if I’d opened it a thousand times
to see if what I’d written here was right,
it’s all because I looked too long for you
to put it in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me.
———–
Excerpted from “Valentines” by Ted Kooser, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
