Words to keep you company, voices that keep singing

Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you.
~Oscar Wilde

Happy Poetry Friday! Poems about the extraordinariness of ordinariness today.

Tin Bucket
by Jenny George

The world is not simple.
Anyone will tell you.
But have you ever washed a person’s hair
over a tin bucket,
gently twisting the rope of it
to wring the water out?
At the end of everything,
dancers just use air as their material.
A voice keeps singing even
without an instrument.
You make your fingers into a comb.

****************

Spiderweb in the mist

PACKING UP THE ARCHIVE
by Tabatha Yeatts

In my daughter's dorm room
while she brings boxes out to the car,
I survey the walls:

           posters, album covers, 
                banners, event flyers,  
             paper butterflies, receipts, 
                 postcards, dried flowers,
            stickers, love notes,
               programs, flags, birthday cards

I pull the tape off the back of each one,
four sticky corners, 
slide them to safety
in case they are for a scrapbook
or a new room,

and notice, among the hundreds
of memorabilia, 
a postcard she made herself:

orange slices 
dangling in mid-air
with the words
I love you
I'm glad I exist–

lines from a poem 
she saw every day in April,
7th grade,
when I led arts programs in her school
and verses lined the hallways.

This poem, which became 
her favorite
and came with her here,

ferries words that will go with her
to her next room
and the next,
wherever that is.

****************

Beyond Literacy Link has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Carol!

Poem history: my poem was written during the Summer Poem Swap and given to Sarah Grace Tuttle.

(Another belated) addendum: The poem Elena likes is Wendy Cope's The Orange. Elena found the image on Pinterest and printed the postcard herself, but someone else made the image -- I like that someone else loved the poem enough to make an image for her to find. So much shared poemlove.