✨ 5 Lucky Poems for St. Patrick's Day!

Stars. Destiny. Bowls. Windows. Lucky poems from our past.

We’re looking forward to our upcoming 12th birthday (watch for it, on Cinco de Mayo!)—and we’re sharing poems from the past while we wait for the big day.

Here are 5 lucky poems that were published in Every Day Poems over time.

Luck is, as it goes, not just for St. Patrick’s Day.

Share these lucky poems anytime, and read them in honor of the famous, four-leafed-clover celebration! :)

1

Lucky

All this time,
the life you were
supposed to live
has been rising around you
like the walls of a house
designed with warm
harmonious lines.

As if you had actually
planned it that way.

As if you had
stacked up bricks
at random,
and built by mistake
a lucky star.

— Kirsten Dierking, from Northern Oracle

2

Work

I could tell they were father and son,
the air between them slack, as though
they hardly noticed one another.

The father sanded the gunwales,
the boy coiled the lines.
And I admired them there, each to his task

in the quiet of the long familiar.
The sawdust coated the father's arms
like dusk coats grass in a field.

The boy worked next on the oarlocks
polishing the brass until it gleamed,
as though he could harness the sun.

Who cares what they were thinking,
lucky in their lives
that the spin of the genetic wheel

slowed twice to a stop
and landed each of them here.

— Sally Bliumus-Dunn, from Echolocation

3

For a New Year

Let plain things please you again
and every ordinary Monday.
Bean soup in a white bowl,
firewood in your arms.
The weight of longing.

That you have survived is evidence
that nothing is assured
but you are lucky.
Looking up from this page
let all of it surprise you—
piled mail, other people, the air.

— Holly Wren Spaulding

First appeared at Gratefulness.org

4

Thanksgiving for Two

The adults we call our children will not be arriving
with their children in tow for Thanksgiving.
We must make our feast ourselves,

slice our half-ham, indulge, fill our plates,
potatoes and green beans
carried to our table near the window.

We are the feast, plenty of years,
arguments. I’m thinking the whole bundle of it
rolls out like a white tablecloth. We wanted

to be good company for one another.
Little did we know that first picnic
how this would go. Your hair was thick,

mine long and easy; we climbed a bluff
to look over a storybook plain. We chose
our spot as high as we could, to see

the river and the checkerboard fields.
What we didn’t see was this day, in
our pajamas if we want to,

wrinkled hands strong, wine
in juice glasses, toasting
whatever’s next,

the decades of side-by-side,
our great good luck.

— Marjorie Saiser, from I Have Nothing To Say About Fire

5

The Once Invisible Garden

How did I come to be
this particular version of me,
and not some other, this morning
of purple delphiniums blooming,
like royalty—destined
to meet these three dogs
asleep at my feet, and not others—
this soft summer morning,
sitting on her screened porch
become ours, our wind chime,
singing of wind and time,
yellow-white digitalis
feeding bees and filling me—
and more abundance to come:
basil, tomatoes, zucchini.
What luck or fate, instinct,
or grace brought me here?—
in shade, beneath hidden stars,
a soft, summer morning,
seeing with my whole being,
love made visible.

— Laura Foley, author of Why I Never Finished My Dissertation

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Poetry Prompt: Lucky Poem

Write your own lucky poem, for St. Patrick’s Day or otherwise.

If you like, take a line from one of the above lucky poems and use it to as an opener or closing for your poem.

Alternately, use one of the lines as a question you then answer in your own poem. Share your poem in the comments!

Featured photo by Venti Views, via Unsplash.