Author Archives

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NPM: My Kind of Worship

This morning I was down at the riverside park for sunrise. The sky was quiet. There were no dramatic streaks of color, just a serene lightening toward day. The moon lingered, a gorgeous waning orb in the west. Mist drifted above the water, testament to the frosty air. Two eagles soared by, and a flock of geese arrowed across the sky. A few mergansers glided across the still water. The fish were active, rising to the surface to create small splashes and concentric rings. Far off I could hear a woodpecker rat-a-tat-tatting. I soaked in the pre-dawn calm.

Soon a car arrived and then another pulled in. After a moment of confusion, I saw a man set up a lectern, and realized there was probably going to be some sort of Easter sunrise service. I didn’t want to get blocked in the parking lot, as I was hoping to catch the red-winged blackbirds singing in a nearby marshy area. If I was lucky and the lighting was right, I might be able to catch their breath in a photo. There’s something so amazing about that to me. At any rate, as a few other service goers arrived, I walked over to my car, feeling grateful and replete.

A man stepped up next to me. “Stay for the services,” he smiled.

“No, thanks,” I responded. “I’ve just been watching the eagles and the sunrise. I’m heading over to the Abbadagasset to see the birds there.”

“You’re missing the Lord,” he replied.

What?

“I have my own way to worship,” I said, getting into my car.

Driving away, I felt a bit taken aback. What should I have said? I’m not a religious person, but hadn’t I just told him I was admiring what he would say are “God’s creations”? Also, wasn’t it presumptuous of him to comment at all on what I was doing. He might think I was “missing the Lord”, but I had to wonder if he was missing the point. Probably it was good that I hadn’t said that.

His words were with me all morning. I wouldn’t say they upset me, but they were there. They were there as I arrived at the next river to watch an osprey soar. As I listened to the red-winged blackbirds call through the marsh. As I heard the far-off lament of migrating geese, and delighted in the antics of two beaver. They were with me as I drove home and en route saw yet another eagle and more mergansers and celebrated the return of the swallows.

They’re still with me as I write this post, hours later.

It was a glorious morning. I was filled with gratitude. In my opinion, I was missing nothing.

I’m sharing a poem I wrote 4 or 5 years ago. It feels like the perfect one for today.

My Kind of Worship

Sunrise service at the river
pink horizon
eagle’s
stare
scattered sunlight
spider’s
lair
universal
morning
prayer

©Molly Hogan

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NPM: Inkling Challenge

I’m dabbling in NPM with a sort of free form project that Margaret Simon and I created. It’s a “calendar-non calendar” grid of various poetic forms with a couple of Free Choice options thrown in. The idea is to try to get to all of them, but in any order you want and with free rein to alter/adapt to make it work. After posting for 31 days in March for the Slice of Life Challenge, I never can commit myself to 30 more days of writing. I consider this an invitation rather than a commitment. If you’re interested in checking out our plan, or playing along, here it is:

One thing Margaret and I knew we had to include was our monthly Inklings challenge. This month Mary Lee Hahn had the prompt, and she invited us to write a poem including these four words: knuckle, denial, turn, cautious. While writing this post, I went back to check the wording of the prompt and realized that Mary Lee had actually said to use “three or more” of these words. Clearly, I hadn’t been reading carefully. Dang it. At any rate, my efforts, which went all over the place, all endeavored to include all four words. I found myself mostly focused on knuckles. I learned about tree knuckles from pollarding, thought about knuckle idioms and considered fists and protective stances. Ultimately, a conversation during our last Inkling meeting led me to consider flowers, and I took the liberty of changing denial to its verb form. I’m not loving the title

Harbinger 

Within willow’s tender catkins
tight-knuckled blossoms swell
denying the cold winds
with cautious optimism 
and a bold turn toward spring

©Molly Hogan, draft

If you’d like to check out what the other Inklings did with this prompt, click on the links below:

Linda Mitchell
Catherine Flynn
Heidi Mordhorst
MaryLee Hahn

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Margaret Simon, my NPM co-conspirator, who is sharing her response to our Inkling prompt and her contributed line to the Progressive Poem. You’ll find links to all sorts of poetic projects there. Set aside some time and enjoy!

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NPM: Free Choice: A Wordle Poem

I Wordle every morning and every so often I use my word choices for the day to create a poem. Yesterday my word choices were : frame, claim, amass and smash. Here’s my poem:

Curating

Frame your day
with gratitude and awe.
Claim it, name it and hang it on the wall
or on a page
or let it tremble on your lips in praise.
Amass a grand collection.
Smash away the drab, the grey!
Keen your eye to wonder–
frame your day.

©Molly Hogan

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NPM: Free Choice: A Small Poem of Gratitude

As one of my students came into class this morning, I pointed to the feeder outside our window.

“Look, S, there’s a bluebird! Isn’t he beautiful?”

He raced over to look.

“I just wrote a poem about a bluebird,” I said.

“You wrote a poem?” he asked.

I nodded. “I love bluebirds so much.”

“Do you know what?” he asked.

“What?”

“Yesterday on the way to the doctor’s I saw a bluebird, and you know what?”

“No, what?” I responded.

“It was so beautiful.” He paused. “It was so beautiful, I almost cried.”

I know what you mean S.

With Gratitude to the Blue Bird

The pulse of your blue
like an animated piece of enchanted sky
free-wheeling elusive indigo
optimism on the wing

©Molly Hogan, draft

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NPM Day 4ish: cherita

In case you’re looking, Day 3 of my NPM (National Poetry Month) “project” didn’t happen. Hence Day 4ish. Of course, now I’m not sure how to move forward. Will tomorrow be 5ish? Am I numbering my actual posts this month or the day of the month? My head’s spinning, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. Maybe tomorrow. If I post. We’ll just have to see how it all unfolds. (If you’re wondering what my project is, you can check out this post. If this all feels a bit unstructured, well…that’s kind of my NPM vibe.)

On a bright note, this morning a lovely little moment called out for recognition. So on the way to work, I dictated a cherita. A cherita is a title-less poem that tells a story in linked 1-line, 2-line and 3-line stanzas. Once I got home, I pulled up my dictated notes, polished them up a tad, and here’s what I had:

Running late, I step outside

a repeating call
stops me in my tracks

High upon our rooftop
sweet phoebe perches
welcoming spring with her tell-tale song

©Molly Hogan

If you find that you enjoy this poetry form, be sure to check out this site where,Mary Lee Hahn is sharing her National Poetry Month project: 30 days of cheritas!

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NPM Day 2: Cinquain

Morning time is precious to me. I woke today, thankful for the flow of another day without timelines and rush, rush, rush. Luxuriating in the feel of a weekday morning, while trying to overlook the Sunday-impending-Monday part of it. Leaning into this time for writing. For wandering. For taking pictures. The time when I try to weave a creative life from noticings and wonderings. From dream fragments, the fading glow of moonlight and the blush of dawn. This morning my soundtrack is the gentle gurgle of the coffee pot, the rising chorus of the birds, the tic-tic-tic of the heating radiators, and the stop-and-start soft scrape of my pen on the page.

each dawn
a tinder box
wisps of dreams like forest duff
pen scrapes the page, one spark ignites
a blaze

©Molly Hogan

*Today Alex Price’s daily #CinquainPrompt was blaze.

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National Poetry Month Begins!

Today marks the beginning of National Poetry Month. Each year I toy with the idea of participating, but I’ve always found it hard to commit after the demands of daily writing in March with the TWT Slice of Life Challenge. This year Margaret Simon and I came up with a very flexible plan for the month. We created a grid of 30 blocks and wrote a poetry form or choice in each one. I’m trying to view it not so much as a plan as a planlette. My focus is on being flexible, low stakes and fun. We used a calendar grid, but there are no dates (although I will admit, the ultimate goal is to check each box at some point during the month). Still, there’s no order and no expectation. I’m trying to think of it as a playground of possibility, not an overwhelming to-do list. You are invited to play along if you’d like. Here it is, all prettified by Margaret.

For my first choice I decided to go over to Laura Purdie Salas’s NPM project. Since I already mentioned playgrounds, this feels like a fitting place to begin. In a nutshell, Laura’s providing 5 topic choices and an array of magnetic words to work with. She’s aptly named it “Digging for Poems.” When I first read about her project, I commented, “I feel like you just opened a new playground and invited everyone in to play with you!”

Again, that’s my lens for the month. Play. Low stakes. Fun. We’ll see if I can keep that lens in place…

Here are two quick responses to Laura’s prompt for today:

Baby

Soft chick.
Finger.
Yummy?
BITE!
“No!!!!”

Wisdom

behind cover of smoke
soft pink glow
break on through

Wishing you a month filled with noticing and wondering about the poetry hidden in your everyday moments. As Naomi Shahib Nye writes so eloquently in “A Valentine for Ernest Mann”,

“So I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment 
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.”

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SOLC Day 31:A Messy Pile of Gratitude

March 2023 SOLC–Day 31
A huge thank you to Two Writing Teachers for all that they do to create an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write, learn, share and grow.
http://www.twowritingteachers.org

This post is also a Poetry Friday post.

Whew! Well, here it is. The last post in this year’s challenge. Success! I won’t say it’s been easy. In fact, this year it’s been more difficult for me than it has in most of my previous years (all 8 or 9 of them–I can never remember).  In short, while part of me will miss the daily posting, a big part is heaving a huge sigh of relief.

I struggled with sleep again last night and composed an awesome acrostic from the word “Slice”. I thought it would be a great ending post, and perhaps that’s why I was finally able to drift back off into sleep. But when I woke this morning it had disappeared into the mist. I sat down to write one again, hoping to retrieve some fragments, but the remnants were well and truly scattered.

I sat for a long time, debating what to stay. What to write. Finally, I realized that I really want to end this month and begin this new day with gratitude. I once met a beautiful, wise soul who said, “All my prayer is praise.” I’m not much of a prayer person, but her words sparked something within me. I love the idea of rooting myself in a practice of giving thanks, of praising. I am far from successful at this, but still I persevere.

Next my thoughts turned to a recent ELA prompt to write a “Pile Poem”. Amy Kay, the mentor poet shared there, was apparently inspired by this quote:

“So, what if, instead of thinking about solving our whole life, you just think about adding additional good things. One at a time. Just let your pile of good things grow.“

A Pile of Gratitude

Choosing 
the first one
is probably the hardest.
My husband? My three children?
The blessing of my sisters? Living in Maine?
Maybe the Carolina wren who sings the day awake
or the fox sparrow scrabbling beneath the birch? I can't
forget the marsh, the beach, the deep green of pine and steely grey granite.
Each day's sunrise. The ever-present chickadee. The bold swagger of a crow on
glittering snow. The laughter of children. Soon, I suspect, my lines will be overflowing, 
overrunning the page, the margins, and rewinding onto the next line, pooling, puddling 
like the extra fabric of curtains in old homes, and I think what a wonder it is to live a life that is 
so full of beauty, friends, family, community, that I have to worry about not having enough room to 
write it all on the page. It simply won't fit within the margins. And isn't that just grand?

©Molly Hogan

After writing this, I previewed to see how the poem looked when published. I realized I was right–when constricted to the blog format, my lines took on a life of their own. No longer does my poem have the ever increasing lines of my draft. To capture that, I’d have to play a bit more with technology, and I decided not to do that. It feels right to let my overflow of gratitude take over the form and make it its own. A teetering messy pile of sorts, one I might need to reconstruct now and again if it tilts or threatens to topple. That feels just about right.

Every day this month the SOL icon has been centered at the top of my post with a thank you to Two Writing Teachers, but that’s so easy to overlook. So here it is again: A huge thank you to Two Writing Teachers for all that they do to create an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write, learn, share and grow. A huge additional thank you to everyone who took the time to read and comment on my blog during the month. I only wish I’d had more time to meander, read and comment along the way.

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, A(nother) Year of Reading. Yet another thing to add to my pile of gratitude.


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SOLC Day 30: Gifts

March 2023 SOLC–Day 30
A huge thank you to Two Writing Teachers for all that they do to create an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write, learn, share and grow.
http://www.twowritingteachers.org

Yesterday morning, after a rough night’s sleep/not sleep, I woke to a gift. In my Inbox was a poem from the poet, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. I don’t subscribe to many daily e-mails, because I simply can’t keep up, but this is one I read regularly. Rosemerry writes and shares a poem each day. Today’s began like this:

“No matter the day is already planned
to the minute. No matter how pressing
the deadline, the must do, the should.
It takes only a second to look out the window.”

I am blessed with many windows in my home and lovely views of green and gardens. I spend lots of time watching the birds, spying deer, watching the seasons unfold in the foliage. I can look through my car windows as I drive to school on winding country roads through rolling fields and beside and over a river each day. I truly am thankful every single day for living in the midst of such beauty.

Still, when times are busy and so much is compacted into a day, I so often forget to look in any sort of meaningful way. The reminder that It takes only a second to look out the window is an important one for me.

Her final verse begins, “How quickly the known world cants toward awe
when wonder slips in…”

This is one reason I love her poetry. She is deeply attuned to the powerful, positive impact of the natural world and nudges me to be so as well.

I thought of her words as I drove to work yesterday, and tried to be more mindful of the beauty that surrounded me. I parked in the early morning empty parking lot at school, and my mind turned to the bird feeders I’d so optimistically placed outside my new classroom window in the fall. How winter’s forces had pulled the pole to the ground. How, in the daily rush to getreadygetmoredonegettothatnextthingonthelist, I’d not taken the time to fix it. Week after week after week.

Today, with Rosemerry’s poem in mind, I dropped off my bags in my classroom, and walked immediately out the end door and around the building. I carefully hoisted the metal pole and repositioned it, straightening the feeders and putting in the last of the bird seed. Then I returned to my race of a day. As the hours passed, every so often I glanced out at the feeders, but nothing stirred.

At about 5 pm, after a staff meeting, the finish line still wasn’t as close as I would have liked. I sat down to begin writing sub plans for this morning, when I have to attend a district meeting. I was tired, and let’s just say my mood wasn’t serene.

A flash of color and movement caught my eye, and I glanced up and out the window. Perched on the platform feeder was a male bluebird. The late afternoon sunlight sparked all his brilliant blue and russet brown into a dazzling glory. I leaned forward to admire, to watch as he hopped about, as he picked up a choice tidbit to eat, stopped, and seemed to cock his head at me. We regarded each other for a moment and then he resumed his seed foraging. I watched him for longer, admiring the intensity of his coloring, the sweet open look of his eyes, the inquisitive tilt of his head. Slowly, I felt some of the day’s accumulated stresses flow off my shoulders. Then I sat back down, settled into my work, a bit lighter, and thoroughly grateful for yet another gift in my day.

“How quickly the known world cants toward awe
when wonder slips in — wonder forged
not from epiphany or greatness
but from the barest instant of meeting what is real.”

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Addendum: Not long after I posted this, I finally emerged from writing to notice that day had arrived while I wasn’t looking. The view had changed since yesterday with a faint dusting of fresh snow covering the garden. Again, movement caught my eye, and as I watched, three turkeys ambled out from beneath the apple tree. Slowly, they sauntered across the driveway and into the garden. One emitted a loud “Gobble Gobble Gobble” and then they all strode off down the driveway. And so the world “cants toward awe.”

It takes only a second to look out the window

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SOLC Day 29: Insomnia

March 2023 SOLC–Day 29
A huge thank you to Two Writing Teachers for all that they do to create an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write, learn, share and grow.
http://www.twowritingteachers.org

Sometimes I fall into patterns of disturbed sleep. I will fall asleep with no problem, but wake in the middle of the night, unable to get back to sleep again. For hours. Or I feel like I’m just floating on sleep, still too alert, not fully resting.

One of my go-to strategies for dealing with this is to write acrostic poems as I’m lying there. It beats tossing and turning and often, if the word is long enough, I’ll somehow lose focus and drift off again. My go-to word is “insomnia.” It seems to fit the bill.

Last night, I feel asleep early, sitting up in bed with my cell phone in my hand, listening to a new pod cast I’d just heard about. Yes, I was that tired. I woke as the cell phone slipped from my grip, put it on the table, turned out the light and fell immediately back to sleep. For about 3 or 4 hours. Then I awoke. Alert.

Uh oh.

First I tried to focus on my breathing. On the softness of the sheets and blankets. On the steady warmth of the cat curled by my side. On consciously relaxing each part of my body. None of that worked, so eventually I turned to acrostics. I composed one after another in my head. Sometimes I lost track of where I was–perhaps I’d slept a little? Still the clock bore witness. This wasn’t working. I knew I’d feel the full impact during the day to come.

Eventually I moved to a different bedroom, turned on the light and read for a while. Finally, I drifted off to dreams of bleeding wounds, melting electric wires and pet injuries. Maybe staying awake would have been a better choice? This morning I’m pulling together the drifty remnants of some of my half-remembered acrostics.

It’s 1:27
Now it’s 1:34
Sleep eludes me
Once again I fret, pick at thoughts
Minutes flow as slow as pitch
No respite in sight
I dread the
Aftermath

Or here’s another one…

It’s like a sneak attack
Nothing and then…
Slam! I’m awake.
Open-eyed,
Mind awhirl
No sleep in sight
Instead a steady barrage of
Ambushing thoughts and worries

Or…

It’s futile, my
Never-ending efforts to
Subordinate my thoughts, to
Overwhelm and dominate them,
Manhandle them into submission
Night-time is their territory
Ideal for their advance
A battle ensues

Ugh. You can see, perhaps why this wasn’t working.

Maybe I need to pick a different word…