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Our website is packed with amazing poetry resources for you and your students.
Want a little help getting started?
Here’s what we recommend . . .
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Got five minutes?
Start with one of these 9 popular Canadian poems for grades 9-12.
Choose your favourite, give your students a copy of the poem, and screen a recitation video. Discuss the poem using our guided questions at the bottom of the poem’s page. -
How about an hour?
Let your students find their favourite poem using our website.
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What about a week?
Your students can experience their favourite poem through reading, recitation, or writing.
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Or even a semester?
Immerse your students in poetry and have them compete in one of our recitation contests.
TideBoth stark and tender, this poem is about Reena Virk, a BC teen of South Asian descent who was assaulted and murdered by her peers in 1997.
Tide
Soraya Peerbaye
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Common MagicDo you ever wonder how anything gets done when we’re all swirling in our own galaxies of thought and experience? This poem does too.
Common Magic
Bronwen Wallace
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mixed tapePunctuated by 90s song titles, this poem about a missing teen has a Side A and Side B.
mixed tape
Katherena Vermette
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I've Tasted My BloodIn this thunderous poem, the speaker proclaims his rage, anguish, and hope in the face of war and oppression.
I've Tasted My Blood
Milton Acorn
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i am graffitiThis poem vibrates with anger and defiance in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
i am graffiti
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
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From Red DocIn this poem-as-a-conversation, a man and his mother consider how the past lives on in the present.
From Red Doc
Anne Carson
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EcholaliaExploring the tension between desire and satisfaction, this is “a poem that you have to kiss your way through without being kissed,” says Williams.
Echolalia
Ian Williams
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From thirstyIn this delicate and brutal poem, the line between the speaker’s body and the city of Toronto blurs.
From thirsty
Dionne Brand
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PlentyWho would have thought a trip to the grocery store could be so full of beauty?
Plenty
Kevin Connolly
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Explore our anthology by poet, mood, or theme.
See how students make a poem their own.
Read their poems and the poems they like.
Run a school-wide recitation contest and submit your winner to our Online Qualifiers.
Team RegionalRun a team recitation contest in your class and consider signing up your school for a Team Regional in your area.
The Daily Poet
Use our four-week writing workshop or The Daily Poet writing prompts to encourage students to become poets themselves.
Customize your poetry unit with our lesson plans — search by grade, skills, and subjects to find exactly what you need.
Tide
Soraya Peerbaye
Would I have seen her?
The tide tugging her gently past
the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,
the bridge and its passersby.
This is not a hidden place.
The graze and drag of her,
clumsy, obstructive in the divided
caress of eelgrass.
No search. Eight days.
Nights,
the moon returned, made chalk tracings around her shape.
Common Magic
Bronwen Wallace
Your best friend falls in love
and her brain turns to water.
You can watch her lips move,
making the customary sounds
but you can see they’re merely
words, flimsy as bubbles rising
from some golden sea where she
swims sleek and exotic as a mermaid.
It’s always like that.
You stop for lunch in a crowded
restaurant and the waitress floats
toward you. You can tell she doesn’t care
whether you have the baked or french-fried
and you wonder if your voice comes
in bubbles too.
It’s not just women either. Or love
for that matter. The old man
across from you on the bus holds
a young child on his knee; he is singing
to her and his voice is a small boy
turning somersaults in the green
country of his blood.
It’s only when the driver calls his stop
that he emerges into this puzzle
of brick and tiny hedges. Only then
you notice his shaking hands, his need
of the child to guide him home.
All over the city
you move in your own seasons
through the seasons of others: old women, faces
clawed by weather you can’t feel
clack dry tongues at passersby
while adolescents seethe
in their glassy atmospheres of anger.
In parks, the children
are alien life-forms, rooted
in the galaxies they’ve grown through
to get here. Their games weave
the interface and their laughter
tickles that part of your brain where smells
are hidden and the nuzzling textures of things.
It’s a wonder that anything gets done
at all: a mechanic flails
at the muffler of your car
through whatever storm he’s trapped inside
and the mailman stares at numbers
from the haze of a distant summer.
Yet somehow letters arrive and buses
remember their routes. Banks balance.
Mangoes ripen on the supermarket shelves.
Everyone manages. You gulp the thin air
of this planet as if it were the only
one you knew. Even the earth you’re
standing on seems solid enough.
It’s always the chance word, unthinking
gesture that unlocks the face before you.
Reveals the intricate countries
deep within the eyes. The hidden
lives, like sudden miracles,
that breathe there.
mixed tape
Katherena Vermette
side a:
1. 18 and Life
her friend takes her to
the guidance counselor
she doesn’t see the point
but her friend won’t go
without her
2. Patience
the dining room table
stacked with papers
her brother’s face
on all of them
like labels
on cans of soup
3. Long Cold Winter
his football team
organizes a search party
scruffy boys in
orange jerseys climb
snow banks
along the river
north
all the way to
lockport
4. Without You
she is as still as silence
jolts every time
the phone rings
5. More than Words
the family sliced into wedges
like pie
6. Don’t Know What You Got
the cold
wet
quiet
when
everyone else
leaves
side b:
7. Nothing Else Matters
the family goes to two psychics
and an elder
8. Every Rose has Its Thorn
one says he will call soon
one says he is dead
one says he is
traveling
north
9. What You Give
words
evaporate
condense
in the air
drip
down
walls
10. Don’t Cry
her stepfather
tells everyone
his son is
dead
and he isn’t going to look
anymore
11. Home Sweet Home
her mother moves
wide and slow
almost imperceptible
limbs floating
as if in water
12. November Rain
the girl walks under
winter naked elms
such a cold november
a season warmer
than her house
I've Tasted My Blood
Milton Acorn
If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
I’ve tasted my blood too much
to love what I was born to.
But my mother’s look
was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;
her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:
and I loved her too much to like
how she dragged her days like a sled over gravel.
Playmates? I remember where their skulls roll!
One died hungry, gnawing grey perch-planks;
one fell, and landed so hard he splashed;
and many and many
come up atom by atom
in the worm-casts of Europe.
My deep prayer a curse.
My deep prayer the promise that this won’t be.
My deep prayer my cunning,
my love, my anger,
and often even my forgiveness
that this won’t be and be.
I’ve tasted my blood too much
to abide what I was born to.
i am graffiti
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
i am writing to tell you
that yes, indeed,
we have noticed
you have a new big pink eraser
we are well aware
you are trying to use it.
erasing indians is a good idea
of course
the bleeding-heart liberals
and communists
can stop feeling bad
for the stealing
and raping
and murdering
and we can all move on
we can be reconciled
except, i am graffiti.
except, mistakes were made.
she painted three white Xs
on the wall of the grocery store.
one. two. three.
then they were erased.
except, i am graffiti.
except, mistakes were made.
the Xs were made out of milk
because they took our food.
one. two. three.
then we were erased.
except, i am graffiti.
except, mistakes were made.
we are the singing remnants
left over after
the bomb went off in slow motion
over a century instead of a fractionated second
it’s too much to process, so we make things instead
we are the singing remnants
left over after
the costumes have been made
collected up
put in a plastic bag, full of intentions
for another time
another project.
except, i am graffiti.
and mistakes were made.
From Red Doc
Anne Carson
GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /
yes / I do vaguely
/ you never liked
him / bit of a
rebel / so you
said / he’s the
one wore lizard
pants and
pearls to graduation / which at the time you admired /
they were good pearls /
you said he reminded you
of
your friend Mildred / Mildred taught me everything I
know she taught me how
to entertain / you must
miss
her / I miss her martinis [stubs cigarette] so what’s he
up to now / just got out of
the army / wounded /
messed up / are they giving him care / a guy shows
up with a padded envelope
of drugs every night I
guess
it’s care / he staying with you / for a while / behaving
himself / some days he sits
around reading Christina
Rossetti some days he comes out of the bathroom
covered in camouflage
paint / keep him away
from
your herd / did I tell you I finished Proust / oh yes /
seven years / can you
reach me
those matches behind you / reading it every day /
thanks / was like having
an extra unconscious /
well I’m
not fond of those multivolume things / there’s the
part where he’s comparing
his Tante Léonie to a
waterlily /
she’s a swimmer / no she’s a neurasthenic / I don’t get
it / well she’s old nervous
lives in a single room
trapped in her little
train of habits the pills the pains the spying out the
window / hmmm / a
waterlily caught in a
current he
says / could be too late for me to appreciate Proust on
the other hand I’m at a loss
I’ve read all the Len
Deightons in the library / hundreds of people visit his
home every year some just
burst into tears / Len
Deighton / no Proust / say remember that time we
were driving and crashed /
what time / I forget where
it was I
was driving no you were driving I was looking out
the window all of a
sudden I thought I saw a
deer racing
out a driveway so I start to just then my brain flashes
on it being a wooden lawn
ornament not a real one
WATCH OUT FOR THAT WOODEN DEER I
yelled so loud you drove
off the road into a guy’s
hedge and
burst into tears [she laughs he laughs] / speaking of
tears / listen [gets out a
cigarette] to that wind /
storm coming / or is it the
traffic / wind I think /
from the north sounds like
/ so your surgery is
scheduled
for when / the 25th / you want me to come with you /
no dear / well if you
change your mind / I
won’t
change my mind / I can easily / thanks though / well
/ [glances down at her
crossword] I’ll be fine /
well so / time for you to
go / I’ll call on the
weekend / take some of
those apples they’re the
kind you like
Echolalia
Ian Williams
Once one gets what one wants
one no longer wants it.
One no longer wants what?
One no longer wants what
one wanted.
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A man and a woman want a woman and a man
or a man and a woman depending
on the man and the woman.
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Once one gets what one wants once
one no longer wants it once
then one no longer wants it at all.
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Yes then no. Yes and no? No.
Yes then no then yes and always
after yes comes no. Never always
yes, but always no. Always know
after yes comes no.
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One wants what one wants
not what one wanted.
From thirsty
Dionne Brand
This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick,
as empty elevators
let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held
the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half-dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history
would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath
and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed
Plenty
Kevin Connolly
The sky, lit up like a question or
an applause meter, is beautiful
like everything else today: the leaves
in the gutters, salt stains on shoes,
the girl at the IGA who looks just like
Julie Delpy, but you don’t tell her —
she’s too young to get the reference and
coming from you it’ll just seem creepy.
So much beauty today you can’t find
room for it, closets already filled
with beautiful trees and smells and
glances and clever turns of phrase.
Behind the sky there’s a storm
on the way, which, with your luck,
will be a beautiful storm — dark
clouds beautiful as they arguably are,
the rain beautiful as it always is —
even lightning can be beautiful in a
scary kind of way (there’s a word
for that, but let’s forget it for the moment).
And maybe the sun will hang in long
enough to light up a few raindrops —
like jewels or glass or those bright beads
girls put between the letters on the
bracelets that spell out their beautiful names —
Skye or Miranda or Verandah — which isn’t
even a name, although it is a word
we use to call things what they are,
and would be a pleasant place to sit
and watch the beautiful sky, beautiful
storm, the people with their beautiful
names walking toward the lake
in lovely clothing saying unpleasant
things over the phone about the people
they work with, all of it just adding to the
mother lode, the surfeit of beauty,
which on this day is just a fancy way
of saying lots, too much, skidloads, plenty.