How We Celebrated Poem on Your Pillow Day

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Poem on Your Pillow Day

It’s not every day that children, on being sent to their beds, respond with shrieks of glee. In fact, as I reflect on that era in which my boys were small enough to be sent to their beds, the only shrieking that may have gone on could not have been connected in even the most fanciful imagination to glee.

And yet, when Bethany Rohde’s children went to their beds and discovered poems on their pillows, the gleeful shrieking began in earnest:

Soon after, they began bargaining for more:

We celebrated the first annual Poem on Your Pillow Day this week, with some folks, like Bethany, offering poems on the pillows of their children. Others, like Kym Gordon Moore, set them out for their guests in a generous and welcoming act:

Monica Sharman took seriously the matter of the history of the pillow, sharing with us a pillow style more akin to the Chinese or Egyptian models than our fancy, fluffy things that threaten to steal our vigor:

Some folks discovered their poems and pillows both missing:

Which may have had something to do with Poem on Your Pillow Day’s potential dark side:

It wasn’t lost on some of us that Poem on Your Pillow Day coincided with Cinco de Mayo, which gave rise to poems about pillows, margaritas and Velveeta:

 

And while bedtime may have begun at the Rohde house with gleeful shrieks, they would surely settle into quiet dreams with these delightful poem-on-your-pillowcase pieces from S Olivante:

Of course, one needn’t wait for next year’s Poem on Your Pillow Day to bring poetry home with a carefully chosen poem for a friend or lover, child or guest. But when it comes to the strangers, one might think about just leaving a poem at the front door.

Photo by Flavio Ronco, Creative Commons license via Flickr. 

More about Poem on Your Pillow Day

It’s Poem on Your Pillow Day (plus Pillow History You Never Knew)

Get the printable collection of Poem on Your Pillow Day poem cards

Enjoy 10 Tempting Poems to Celebrate Poem on Your Pillow Day (or any other day)

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Will Willingham
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Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry
I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel, Adjustments, is available now.
Will Willingham
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Comments

  2. That “glee” totally makes my day. How fun.

    I loved putting poems on my children’s pillows, and I set the poems in the arms of the resident doll and teddy bear respectively. It was very fun to discover that my younger daughter and I had put the same poem on each other’s pillows! 🙂 I’d describe her response more as “eyes shining.”

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