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Tanka Project #30: Lost

Once a month I get to go to an amazing poetry group at the Glasgow Women's Library (which is also an amazing place). This is one of those things that you do and it feels like the universe has gift wrapped it just for you. I get to work with brilliant women and it is totally inspiring.

This month we were looking at a gorgeous poem by Dana Gioia, Nothing is Lost, which someone else has shared here. In it Dana imagines a coin once held by you as a child coming back to you as an adult, and the different ways that you'd understand it at the different times. There is a call there to pause and reflect on the little things and there is also a nod to the things that end up in pockets.

As a parent, pockets and bags can be filled with weird things, things that not only you chose for their shape or look or oddness, but other people's little hand-holdy things.

The other day I had a blue dinosaur in my pocket. It probably wasn't the one I had in my pocket in my childhood, pulled out from a cereal packet and squirrelled away. It probably wasn't the similar one in the Charlie and Lola story. But it had the same long neck, the same pleasing bumpiness to caress in the pocket.



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