Currently the most read poems in my classes:

• POWER To The...

  Here’s one of my own, which I wrote just before I got pregnant for my daughter. ~Erika Faith

  POWER To The…

  adoring man
  burning woman
  changing landscape
  divine order
  egg and sperm
  family gathering
  guacamole munchies
  humor healing
  intimate initiation
  just humble
  kind understanding
  letting go
  mental massage
  never know
  often mysterious
  penis envy
  quiet desperation
  rustic renovations
  simple living
  tutor and tutee
  union eternity
  volume discounts
  welcome mat
  x-ample couple
  youth gone
  zeitgeist unfolding

• From E. E. Cummings (Complete Poems 1904-1962)

  let it go – the
  smashed word broken
  open vow or
  the oath cracked length
  wise – let it go it
  was sworn to
  go

  let them go – the
  truthful liars and
  the false fair friends
  and the boths and
  neithers – you must let them go they
  were born
  to go

  let all go – the
  big small middling
  tall bigger really
  the biggest and all
  things – let all go
  dear

  so comes love

• Are You Looking For Me? by Kabir

  Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
  My shoulder is against yours.
  You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms,
  nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
  not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding
  around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but
  vegetables.
  When you look for me, you will see me
  instantly –
  you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
  Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
  He is the breath inside the breath.

  - translated by Robert Bly

• Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

  Before you know what kindness really is
  you must lose things,
  feel the future dissolve in a moment
  like salt in a weakened broth.
  What you held in your hand,
  what you counted and carefully saved,
  all this must go so you know
  how desolate the landscape can be
  between the regions of kindness.
  How you ride and ride
  thinking the bus will never stop,
  the passengers eating maize and chicken
  will stare out the window forever.

  Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
  you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
  lies dead by the side of the road.
  You must see how this could be you,
  how he too was someone
  who journeyed through the night with plans
  and the simple breath that kept him alive.

  Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
  you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
  You must wake up with sorrow.
  You must speak to it till your voice
  catches the thread of all sorrows
  and you see the size of the cloth.

  Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
  only kindness that ties your shoes
  and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
  only kindness that raises its head
  from the crowd of the world to say
  it is I you have been looking for,
  and then goes with you every where
  like a shadow or a friend.