The poem you carry in your head: what is it, and how did it get in there?

[Rachel]

Beyond the prompts and the workshops, a softer thread. Nearly everyone who loves poetry carries at least one poem or fragment in their head, the lines that surface unbidden while washing up or waiting for a bus, and how those particular lines got lodged there is usually a story worth telling

So, three parts if you are willing. The poem or the lines you carry, credited to the poet, kept to a line or two rather than the whole piece out of respect for the writer. The story of how it got in, a teacher, a funeral, a card, the back of a song. And what it does for you now, comfort, spine stiffening, a laugh, a wound kept deliberately open

No gatekeeping in this thread, the carried poem can be canonical or a nursery rhyme or something from a greetings card that outlived its occasion. What earns a poem permanent residence in a head is private business and this board respects the tenancy

I suspect the stories will be better than any prompt we have ever run. Prove me right

[DiamondDallas_X]

Two lines of Tennyson from a school assembly forty years ago, planted by a teacher who read it like it mattered. It surfaces every single time I have to be brave and I never once chose it

[IronFist21]

The read it like it mattered detail is everything, one teacher performing one poem properly outlasts a decade of comprehension worksheets

[Daresh84]

Mine is from a funeral order of service for someone I barely knew, and the lines stayed longer than the grief did. Poems hitch rides on occasions, they do not care whose

[KernelKnight16]

A nursery rhyme, honestly, the one my mother did the voices for. Canon is a library, residence is a home, this thread has the distinction exactly right

[WWEHarry78]

Carrying a limerick I am afraid to attribute in polite company, it surfaces exclusively during serious meetings, the tenancy agreement has no eviction clause and I have stopped fighting it

[WaveFunction30]

The inappropriate resident limerick is a documented medical condition on this board, you are among sufferers

[SharpFox]

Mine arrived via a song lyric that turned out to be borrowed from a poet I then read for a whole summer. The back door into poetry is still a door

[Dave_37]

A fragment in a language I no longer really speak, from a grandmother, and the not quite understanding is somehow part of what it does. Meaning is not the only cargo

[Shane]

That last line deserves to be in somebody's poem

[FinnBalor99]

What strikes me reading down the thread is nobody carries a poem they chose from a best of list, every single one was planted by a person or an occasion. Poems travel by hand, apparently