Do you have a favorite poem that speaks to you when far you roam?

When it comes to writing about the sensations and challenges of travel, articles and guidebooks don’t always do the trick. It’s hard, for example, to think of a better, tighter description of jet flight than this snippet from John Betjeman’s poem “Back From Australia”:

Cocooned in time, at this inhuman height,
The packaged food tastes neutrally of clay,
We never seem to catch the running day
But travel on in everlasting night
With all the chic accoutrements of flight:
Lotions and essences in neat array
And yet another plastic cup and tray.

Though there’s plenty of travel prose out there, not to mention images and sketches, it’s always seemed to us that poems of travel and of particular destinations have been kind of left out.

The Travel section is hoping to do its part to fix that. We’re asking readers -- that’s you -- to send us your favorite poem or poems related to travel, along with a brief explanation of why you like them.

Poems that you choose could have been special in “opening up” places you have traveled, creating a smile or a smirk, or in helping you notice stuff on the road.

Or maybe a poem has eased you into the mood for a trip, or brought back travel memories once you’re home.

The most interesting poems and feedback we get will be included in a future Travel section feature.

Whether it’s Kipling on India, Wordsworth on England’s Lake District, Sandburg on Chicago, Elizabeth Bishop on Brazil, or Frost on rural New Hampshire, poems you choose can be literary or light; old-fashioned or contemporary; famous or not-yet. Maybe you were snagged by lines like these by Alan Seeger:

Oh, go to Paris … In the midday gloom
Of some old quarter take a little room
That looks off over Paris and its towers
From Saint Gervais round to the Emperor’s Tomb,
So high that you can hear a mating dove
Croon down the chimney from the roof above

Or maybe this, from “In the Park” by Maxine Kumin, is more your thing:

You have forty-nine days between
death and rebirth if you’re a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim
the English Channel in that time
or climb, like a ten-month-old child,
every step of the Washington Monument
to travel across, up, down, over or through
-- you won’t know till you get there which to do.

Dredge up a dusty textbook. Browse a bookstore. We’re asking, though, that you resist the temptation to submit your own work, as good as it may be.

Along with your full name, address, phone and email, send the titles of favorite travel poems or excerpts, and why you like them, to travel@latimes.com. Put “Travel Poetry” in the subject line.

The deadline: Oct. 30, 2014. And pass the word to others who might be interested in sharing their picks.