Five Poems for National Poetry Day

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Five Poems for National Poetry Day

Five Poems for National Poetry Day

3 October 2024

National Poetry Day is an occasion for everyone across the UK to celebrate poetry – in classrooms, bookshops and libraries, at home, onstage and online. The theme in 2024 is ‘counting’, and the poems gathered here explore this subject in a number of ways.

Counting forms part of how we learn and play in youth, often reeled off in rhyming poems. We see this darkly subverted in Stevie Smith’s ‘Tenuous and Precarious’, with its ominous final countdown.

Counting manifests in recipes, sets of instructions and the list of options wittily proffered as dating advice in Wendy Cope’s ‘Two Cures for Love’.

It is crucial in sporting matches and games, building anticipation and determining who wins, as in Simon Armitage’s ‘Great Sporting Moments: The Treble’ with its calculating narrator.

Stark statistics are used to quantify the realities around us – often disguising personal stories at the level of the individual, evident in Natalie Diaz’s ‘American Arithmetic’.

It may be the sequence of a few simple words that, in sum, are the most powerful of all: becoming a wish, prayer or – as in Ilya Kaminsky’s poem – elegy.

What all these poems share and what this day celebrates primarily is the belief that poetry counts – it truly matters for each and every one of us.

There are many ways to make this day count – see the Forward Arts Foundation’s National Poetry Day website for a list of activities and events happening throughout the day.

National Poetry Day Poems

Tenuous and Precarious Tenuous and Precarious Were my guardians, Precarious and Tenuous, Two Romans. My father was Hazardous, Hazardous, Dear old man, Three Romans. There was my brother Spurious, Spurious Posthumous, Spurious was Spurious, Was four Romans. My husband was Perfidious, He was Perfidious Five Romans. Surreptitious, our son, Was Surreptitious, He was six Romans. Our cat Tedious Still lives, Count not Tedious Yet. My name is Finis, Finis, Finis, I am Finis, Six, five, four, three, two, One Roman, Finis.

‘Tenuous and Precarious’ by Stevie Smith appears in her Collected Poems and Drawings.

Two Cures for Love 1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter. 2. The easy way: get to know him better.

‘Two Cures for Love’ by Wendy Cope appears in The Orange and other poems.

Great Sporting Moments: The Treble The rich! I love them. Trust them to suppose the gift of tennis is deep in their bones. Those chaps from the coast with all their own gear from electric eyes to the umpire’s chair, like him whose arse I whipped with five choice strokes perfected on West Yorkshire’s threadbare courts: a big first serve that strained his alloy frame, a straight return that went back like a train, a lob that left him gawping like a fish, a backhand pass that kicked and drew a wisp of chalk, a smash like a rubber bullet and a bruise to go with it. Three straight sets. Smarting in the locker rooms he offered double or quits; he was a born golfer and round the links he’d wipe the floor with me. I played the ignoramus to a tee: the pleb in the gag who asked the viscount what those eggcup-like things were all about – ‘They’re to rest my balls on when I’m driving.’ ‘Blimey, guv, Rolls-Royce think of everything’ – but at the fifth when I hadn’t faltered he lost his rag and threw down the gauntlet; we’d settle this like men: with the gloves on. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. OK, come on then.

‘Great Sporting Moments: The Treble’ by Simon Armitage appears in Kid.

$American Arithmetic Native Americans make up less than 1 percent of the population of America. 0.8 percent of 100 percent. O, mine efficient country. I do not remember the days before America— I do not remember the days when we were all here. Police kill Native Americans more than any other race. Race is a funny word. Race implies someone will win, implies, I have as good a chance of winning as— Who wins the race that isn’t a race? Native Americans make up 1.9 percent of all police killings, higher per capita than any race— sometimes race means run. I’m not good at math—can you blame me? I’ve had an American education. We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent of Americans. We do a better job of dying by police than we do existing. When we are dying, who should we call? The police? Or our senator? Please, someone, call my mother. At the National Museum of the American Indian, 68 percent of the collection is from the United States. I am doing my best to not become a museum of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible. But in an American room of one hundred people, I am Native American—less than one, less than whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction of a body, let’s say, I am only a hand— and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover I disappear completely.$

‘American Arithmetic’ by Natalie Diaz appears in Postcolonial Love Poem.

Elegy Six words, Lord: please ease of song my tongue.

‘Elegy’ by Ilya Kaminsky appears in Deaf Republic.

Five Poems for National Poetry Day

National Poetry Day is an occasion for everyone across the UK to celebrate poetry – in classrooms, bookshops and libraries, at home, onstage and online. The theme in 2024 is ‘counting’, and the poems gathered here explore this subject in a number of ways.

National Poetry Day Poems

Read more poems on the Faber Journal in our Weekly Poem feature.