Serendipity: What happens when you’re paying attention.

Serendipity: My method for finding poems for the various collections I curate.

Oddity: How often someone who walks, bikes, and takes transit for the majority of her gettin’ around runs into poems about driving worth saving.

“You can only see as far as your headlights shine, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E. L. Doctorow

“One Driving Home” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
(A haiku so this is the whole poem, but visit Rosemerry’s site anyway and browse through her wonderful work)

long grey hem of highway
each yellow dash a stitch
I’m ripping out

“Slow Dancing on the Highway: The Trip North” by Elizabeth Hobbs

We do a slow tango as we change lanes in tandem,

gracefully, as though music were guiding us.

“December” by Michael Miller

I want to be a passenger

in your car again
and shut my eyes
while you sit at the wheel,

“Driving Through” by Mark Vinz

Tell yourself it doesn’t matter now,
you’re only driving through.
Past the sagging, empty porches
locked up tight to travelers’ stares,

“Driving Across Utah in the Dark” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

But all I see beyond pavement
and white and yellow lines,
is thick black night and
a memory of years ago,
driving this same highway,

“Double Rainbow” by Ravi Shankar

Speeding, without destination, after dark
torrents have poured & been returned
at home, the skies above mirror my mood,

“Lana Del Rey on Country Roads” by Tamsin Moore

Long, empty roads stretching as long as the gas tank is willing—
Sixty-seven dollars left from last summer’s job, but that doesn’t matter with
the windows rolled down, her hair blowing back; she doesn’t push it behind
her ear, her hand is busy holding mine.

“Pedestrian Crossing, Charlottesville” by Rita Dove

A gaggle of girls giggle over the bricks
leading off Court Square. We brake

dutifully, and wait; but there’s at least
twenty of these knob-kneed creatures,

“The Solidarity of Landing” by Leslie Dianne

There is always
an awakening
when the flight
reaches New York
no one wants to miss
the descent

 Related Reading

• Walking Poems 
• Still Walking, More Poetry 
• “Safe passage through countless intersections”: A Baker’s Dozen of Transportation Poems 
• “Do Not Drive Through, This Poem’s In The Way”: Transportation Poems Keep Rolling In 
• How We Get Where We’re Going: Transportation Poems 
• Yes, Even More Transportation Poems 
• Bike Song Playlist: Tunes to Get You Rolling
• “I think/therefore/I ride.” A Bike Rack of Bicycle Poems 
• More Poems on the Bike Rack 
• What’s in a Name? Acoustic or Analog, Regular or Traditional Bicycle* 
• Hashtag Bikes