10 Poems About Kindness

Kindness can be an underestimated virtue in our increasingly hectic and impersonal world. It is a word that we use most often in our conversations with young children when we tell them to be kind to a fellow creature or a new friend.

These generous poems remind us that kindness can take many forms and that a kind gesture doesn’t have to be either time-consuming or complicated. On the contrary:

“Sometimes a sober voice is enough
to calm the waters & drive away
the false witnesses,”

from ‘Kindness’ by Yusef Komunyakaa

Edited by Jackie Kay and containing two new poems she has written specially for the anthology, this moving selection is allied to a compelling cause. ‘Felix’s Campaign of Kindness’ was instigated by the mother of Felix Alexander, a 17-year-old boy who took his own life after years of online bullying. The pamphlet is dedicated to the memory of Felix and contains the inspirational open letter written by his mother after his death.

Jackie Kay is one of the foremost poets writing in Britain today. She has published numerous poetry collections and a memoir, Red Dust Road, about her quest to find her birth parents. She was the third modern Makar, the Scottish Poet Laureate.

Included are two special edition postcards featuring poems by Olga Dermott-Bond and Zoë Green, who were the winners in our Kindness Poem Competition.

Poems by Fleur Adcock, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ian Duhig, Sarah Howe, Jackie Kay, Yusef Komunyakaa, Norman MacCaig, Sylvia Plath, Rabindranath Tagore and Kae Tempest.