Ten short travel poems to inspire your next getaway.
Travel poems have a way of connecting to our emotions. Words bear as much weight as a full suitcase. Short, rhymed lines transport us from place to place. And liminal spaces (like airports) become symbols of change.
Ahead are ten travel poems to read to celebrate National Poetry Month.
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10 Travel Poems To Read
Vacation by Rita Dove
Read Vacation by Rita Dove during “the hour before takeoff / that stretch of no time, no home” when you wait in one of the “gray vinyl seats” near your gate. The poem was first published in 1994, but that in-between “before the loudspeaker blurts” feels much the same.
Read the full poem: Poets.org
At The Airport by Joy Sullivan
At The Airport by Joy Sullivan reframed the way I think about airport security lines. Now, as I slide my backpack into a bin and press it forward, I think about all the “unholy elements” Sullivan describes in At The Airport, “the million intimacies security must visit.” Anxiety, eased.
Read the full poem: Bookshop.org, Amazon
Travel by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay depicts wanderlust in Travel, a poem whose ending is always quote-worthy: “Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, / No matter where it’s going.”
Read the full poem: Poets.org
Hearthside by Dorothy Parker
In Hearthside, Dorothy Parker laments all the places she won’t see, the “older waters” and “quiet valleys.” Yet, for those who love travel, Parker’s lament slips into the shape of a satire that fuels the desire to go, to escape. My favorite lines: “If I seek a lovelier part, / Where I travel goes my heart; / Where I stray my thought must go; / “With me wanders my desire.”
Read the full poem: Poets.org
In Italy by Derek Walcott
In Italy by Derek Walcott is the poem to read if you want to daydream about Italy (its roads, its fields, its sea) with more intensity than Lotty from The Enchanted April. The first time I read In Italy, I felt that giddy, disorienting feeling that arrives in a rush when you tilt your head up after getting lost in a good book. “I have come this late / to Italy, but better now, perhaps, than in youth,” Walcott writes.
Read the full poem: The New Yorker
Instructions For Traveling West by Joy Sullivan
A life upheaval reminiscent of those in late aughts and early twenty-tens travelogues spurs Joy Sullivan’s modern poetry collection, Instructions For Traveling West. The collection, a road trip accompaniment, contains three of my favorite travel poems: At The Airport, Culpable, and (the title-inspiration) Instructions For Traveling West. “Take the trail that promises a view. / Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep going.”
Read the full poem: Bookshop.org, Amazon
Traveler, Your Footprints by Antonio Machado
Traveler, Your Footprints by Antonio Machado underlines the paths we forge and futures we set. “Traveler, there is no road; / you make your own path as you walk.”
Read the full poem: Poetry Foundation
The Problem With Travel by Ada Limón
“Every time I’m in an airport, / I think I should drastically / change my life,” begins Ada Limón’s The Problem With Travel, a moody poem for those who carry runaway travel fantasies (me, always) into each trip. Limón touches on the feeling of returning home, of locking into images that keep us grounded (even in an airport lobby).
Read the full poem: Bookshop.org, Amazon
I Thought It Was Tangiers I Wanted by Langston Hughes
With song-like lyricism, Langston Hughes describes the places he’s seen: Paris, Antwerp, Genoa, Venice, Tangiers. “I thought it was Tangiers I wanted” he repeats for a refrain. He travels and travels, but happiness doesn’t arrive. “Happiness lies nowhere, / Some old fool said, / If not within oneself.”
Read the full poem: Bookshop.org, Amazon
Postscript by Seamus Heaney
Postscript is a postcard of a poem. Details from a “drive out west” where the sea, a breeze, a lake, and a flock of swans meet in memory. “Useless to think you’ll park and capture it / More thoroughly,” Heaney writes. Yet, he does, through words that feel like a hello-from letter to a friend.
Read the full poem: The Irish Times
Did you enjoy this list of travel poems? What are your favorite travel poems? Let me know in the comments below!
I love Atticus.
How beautiful, Anshula! These are so inspiring.
Dee ~ Vanilla Papers
I love these, thanks. Time to share to my friends on FB!