Category Archives: Poetry

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Raccoons and Cherita

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Inspired by Diane Mayr (Random Noodling) and others, I’ve been wanting to write a cherita for a while.  I was intrigued by the flexibility of the form (no syllabic count!) and the narrative focus. The word cherita comes from the Malay word for story. The cherita’s creator, ai li, describes it thus: “”a single stanza of a one-line verse, followed by a two-line verse, and then finishing with a three-line verse.” I’m pretty sure I still have a lot to learn about the nuances of the form, but I’ve had fun playing around with it. I decided to put two cherita together, because… well, why not!? I do hope this isn’t offensive to any cherita purists out there.

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Betrayed by bare branches

you scramble upward
toward the apple or away from me?

I edge in to capture
not your body, but your face
deceptively innocent

For long moments

your clever hands hold tight
I take picture after picture

You climb higher into swaying branches
your backward glance reproaches
contrite, I depart.

M. Hogan ©2018

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I knew I’d played around with a cherita before, and I went back through my notebooks determined to find it. I couldn’t even remember what I’d written about. How surprised I was to find this cherita, written in mid-August.

The trap has sprung

Feeders rest on the earth
amidst scattered sunflower seeds

Within the trap
lie a few lonely suet crumbs
the bandit has escaped

M. Hogan © 2018

Clearly this raccoon situation isn’t a new one!  Oh, and for the record, it was a Have-a-Heart trap.

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My post today combines my love of photography, nature, and poetry. I am thankful for all of these things (and so many more!) and, as always, for the wonderful support and community of this group. This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Irene Latham at her blog, Live Your Poem. In a haiku bonanza, she’s sharing a beautiful new book by Laura Purdie Salas and a link to a Jack Prelutsky read along. Be sure to check it out and add some poetry to your holiday weekend!

 

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Snow Day

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Snow Day

Storm talk
take stock
…snow day?

Big debate
4 or 8?
Snow day?

Grey leaden sky
fat snowflakes fly
Hey, weather guy!
Snow day?

Cold winds blowing
White drifts growing
Still not knowing…
Snow day?

Hope clings…
Phone rings
My heart sings
SNOW DAY!

M.  Hogan ©2018

Linda Baie is hosting this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at her chockful-of-book-love blog, Teacher Dance. She’s sharing a lovely new lullaby book from Rosemary Wells.

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Submit

Jennifer Laffin’s  Word of the Day (#DWHabit) today was “submit.” It popped up on my Facebook page and I had an immediate reaction. I wrote this in about two minutes, then accidentally submitted it before rereading/editing. Oops! I figured I might as well share it here as well. In for a penny, in for a pound…

Submit

I read the word “submit”
and feel a visceral kick
an urge to resist
I won’t stand still for it
all this SHIT
makes me want to hit
so I strike my keys…
then click submit

M. Hogan ©2018

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Nature’s Lessons

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Two long tailed ducks
rise and fall in churning surf
serene amidst chaos

M. Hogan ©2018

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Late blooming lupine
brilliant against autumn leaves
discordant harmony

M. Hogan ©2018

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Michelle H. Barnes of Today’s Little Ditty  fame. In addition to hosting, she’s sharing several powerful poems to highlight the ups and downs of this volatile week.

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A Poster Can Be…

unnamedIn mid-October we always head to the fire station for a fire safety presentation. It’s a short walk from school, or a short bus trip in inclement weather. The kids typically have the opportunity to explore firetrucks and equipment, watch a fire safety video, and interact with the firemen and women. There’s also Sparky, the water-squirting, fire-truck-driving, mechanical dog. As you can imagine, the event is always a hit with the kids.

This year’s presentation was very well-designed and my students were thoroughly engaged. Our fourth grade group was split into our three classes to rotate through different activities. My class had the good fortune to see the video first.

After the video, some inspired soul (clearly never an elementary school teacher) thought it would be a great idea to give each child a fire-safety poster. In the past the posters have been distributed at the end of the day at school. This time, the poster was placed into each eager fourth grade hand. Since we saw the video first (Remember, I mentioned our good fortune? You can reread that sentence with some sarcasm right now. I’ll wait.), these posters came with my students through the next two stations. So, for the next 30 or so minutes, while waiting in line to participate, students had a rolled up (or unrolled) poster in their hands. Or on their friends. Or in their mouths. Yup.

It’s truly amazing what a poster can become, and although you might not think so, a rolled up poster can be even more entertaining than the Jaws Of Life. I can attest to the veracity of that statement.

At any rate, the events of the day inspired this poem:

Roll Up A Poster and It Can Become…

A lyrical flute or a megaphone
a spyglass to spy out the journey home
a sound tube to whisper secrets and dreams
or amplify noises and high-pitched screams
A pirate sword in a desperate fight
“Ahoy, ye maties!” Jab left! Jab right!
Finally, unrolled at the end of play
a poster can show tips to save the day
So many distinct possibilities
I wonder what else a poster can be…

M. Hogan ©2018

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by the amazing Jama Rattigan at her lush blog, Jama’s Alphabet Soup. Make sure to stop by and check out the poetry action. If you’re in the soggy Northeast, it will offer a nice respite from the unrelenting grey and drizzly weather. (Or, alternatively, get yourself a poster and let your imagination go wild!)

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A Zeno

unnamedLike so many others, thanks to Margaret Simon‘s introduction and wonderful mentor poems, I jumped right on the Zeno train. The form was created by J. Patrick Lewis and consists of 8 lines with a syllable count of 8,4,2,1,4,2,1,4,2,1, with the one syllable lines rhyming. I’ve been playing around with it a lot in my notebook lately.

Last weekend as the sun rose, I spotted this lovely tree, brilliant in the midst of the frost-covered cemetery. It seemed a perfect fit for a Zeno. I’m still toying around with endings, but for now I’m going with this version.

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O’er frosted tombstones, amber flare
surges upward
glowing
bright
final flash of
golden
light
doused too soon by
winter’s
night

M. Hogan ©2018

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by the warmly welcoming Brenda Davis Harsham at her lovely blog, Friendly Fairy Tales. Thanks, Brenda!

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TLD September Challenge

unnamedThis month Michelle H. Barnes interviewed Naomi Shihab Nye for Today’s Little Ditty. If you haven’t read the interview yet, be sure to check it out here. Michelle writes a mean interview, and time spent with Naomi Shihab Nye is always time well spent. You also get a sneak peek at some poems from her most recent book, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners. Naomi Shihab Nye’s challenge for the month was to write letters to ourselves or some sort of introspective poem (not necessarily in letter format) in which we pose questions which we don’t necessarily answer. Here’s my effort:

Skiing—Victory or Defeat?

What was I thinking?
What erratic firing of neurons placed me here
on an icy snow-covered hill
heading in slow motion for the trees
with quivering thighs
fighting a losing battle
with “pizza”
or what was called snowplow
decades ago?
Why did I think this would be fun?
I, who hate adrenalin, speed and heights?
Was this some sort of test
I assigned myself?
Just who am I trying to impress?

Deliberately, I tip and fall
skid to a snowy inelegant stop
remove the rented skis
rise and pick up the scattered equipment
then walk down the mountain

It feels like victory to me.

©2018 M. Hogan

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Jone Rush MacCulloch at her blog. She’s featuring a poem from “Great Morning” by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong.

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Playing with Verbs

unnamedRecently, Irene Latham posted a poem challenge in a post titled Free Verbs! Pick 5. She shared a picture of verbs she’d seen in a Kindermusik room. The challenge was to choose five words and write a poem containing those words. I chose the words: poke, creep, punch, spin and press. Here’s my effort:

Fall’s shadow
infiltrates summer
poking chilly fingers
into early mornings
creeping into shivering trees
punching color onto leaves
spinning birds into southward flight
pressing closer, closer, closer.

M. Hogan ©2018

The Poetry Friday Round-up this week is hosted by the gallery hostess-with-the-mostest, Carol Varsalona, at her blog, Beyond Literacy Link. She’s sharing a sneak peek at her upcoming summer gallery, The Art of Summering. (Pssst–you can still send her a submission if you get it in today!)

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Poetry and Prison

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Poetry Foundation’s poem of the day on August 27th was “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service.  The poem begins like this:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
      By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
  That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
  But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
   I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam ’round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that “he’d sooner live in hell.”

The poem continues for thirteen more verses then ends with a repetition of the refrain.  It struck me as a poem I would have enjoyed reciting with friends on a long bus ride or at camp (rather like the Titanic song “Oh, they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue.”)  It seemed an unusual choice for Poetry Foundation to share… until I saw the editor’s note. It stated that this had been Senator John McCain’s favorite poem. The story goes that when he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he and another prisoner “typed” this poem back and forth to each other through the walls of their cells using a tap code.

I was fascinated by this story and decided to investigate. I  discovered an episode of Poetry in America that focused on the poem, “To Prisoners”, by Gwendolyn Brooks. It was described like this: “This episode brings together a group of interpreters who learned in prison to hear poetry’s “call.”  Learn from Senator John McCain, playwright and activist Anna Deavere Smith, poets Reginald Dwayne Betts and Li-Young Lee, and four exonerated prisoners about poetry’s special resonance for those behind bars.” I clicked on it to check it out and was drawn in for the full 25 minute episode. It’s a fascinating look at the poem and how different people interpret it.

To Prisoners
I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
in the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences.
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
I call for you
cultivation of victory Over
long blows that you want to give and blows you are going to get.click here to read the rest of the poem.

Watching the video, I learned more about the story of the poem tapping that first sent me on my internet journey. What I discovered was that Bill Lawrence, who occupied a cell next to John McCain, actually taught John McCain that poem while they were in prison. (Tune in at 11:40 in the video if you want to hear McCain recite part of this poem and tell the story.) McCain explained that Bill would type a few lines to him and then he would tap them back. Each time McCain would add the lines to what he’d already learned, accumulating the poem. It gave them both something to think about. Learning this poem and tapping it back and forth was an important part of the communication that was so vital in helping McCain and others survive torture and solitary confinement.Learning about McCain’s experience with poetry in prison, reading these words by Gwendolyn Brooks, and listening to the personal interpretations of others had such an impact on me. It reminded me of the power of poetry. No, remind is too weak a word–it lit a flare of awareness–a blaze of wonder– about the power of words to offer connection, to express pain, to kindle hope, to help us in our darkest times. It also reinforced for me the importance of taking time to dig into a poem, to consider each word and all its nuances and how this is the work of the poet and the reader.

The more I thought about Gwendolyn Brooks and the more I read and considered this poem, the more I thought of her as a sorceress, and her poem, an incantation. “I call for you…” Brooks carefully selected words and images to pour into her crucible and the resulting poem glows with power.  It pulses with pain and potential triumph. It speaks to those who suffer in literal prisons, yet also speaks to those who suffer from other less tangible prisons–depression, abuse, etc.

This poem and McCain’s story still move in me, generating thoughts, connections, wonderings. They say that where there are poets, and where there is poetry, you’re never alone. Now that’s powerful magic.

This week Robyn Hood Black is rounding up the old fashioned way at her blog, Life on the Deckle Edge. Stop by to experience the power of poetry!