It was a weekend that inspired poetry, and perhaps more importantly, allowed time for it. My husband and I were driving our daughter from Maine to Philly to move into her new apartment. She’s the first one of our children to fly far from the nest, so this was new territory in more ways than one. One of the upsides of the drive was time with my writing notebook in hand as we careened along the highways or, all too often, idled in traffic. With my husband willing to handle most of the driving, I had the luxury of plenty of time to read and write.

A highlight of the long road trip was reading some of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. I just purchased this recently after reading about it in a post by Catherine Flynn. (Thank you, Catherine!!) It’s a joy of a read with so many wonderful prompts for dipping into words and poetry– for playing. Her love of words shines through the pages and inspires me to look closer, to notice, and to write.

English muffin clouds
nooked and crannied
drenched in buttery sunlight

Molly Hogan (c) 2017

I also was inspired by Michelle Barnes who writes Today’s Little Ditty and who recently shared a challenge from Carole Boston Weatherford to write an abecedarian poem. I’ve been toying with this form for a week or two and played around with it on our car ride as well. I shared the concept with my husband and daughter and we had some fun creating possible themes for such poems–words you’d like to yell at drivers, inventions you wish were created, etc. Michelle’s invitation stated that you could use sections of the alphabet, as long as they were sequential. Although initially I was determined to use all 26 letters, I finally decided not to try to force the x,y,z lines. Here’s what I came up with:

Foggy night

A blank canvas
dew-damp and dark
Ethereal fingerlets and
fronds of fog
ghost and hover
in insubstantial inky jumbles
a kaleidoscope
of lingering moonshine
and nebulous outlines
a patchwork of quivering
roiling swirls and
tenuous tendrils of undulating
vaporous waves
Wisps of wizardry

Molly Hogan (c) 2017

And then there was this heart-full moment with my daughter as we shopped for apartment accessories and essentials at Target. I’m not satisfied with the poem, but the moment was priceless.

Suddenly stopping
by the Home Goods aisle
she rushes around the laden cart
and wraps her arms around me
hugging me close

When I loosen my arms
to release her,
she holds on tighter
longer
til tears prick
and the all-too-short
eternal moment
tattoos my heart.

Molly Hogan (c) 2017

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by the magnificent Amy Ludwig Vanderwater at her blog, The Poem Farm. Talk about inspiring! Make sure to carve out some extra time to spend exploring her rich site–You won’t regret it!

It’s Thursday and time for another 15 words or less poem. Today’s photo prompt from Laura P. Salas was International Peace Day inspired. Sadly, my thoughts were more negative. The beads reminded me of an abacus and that lead to thoughts of the ghastly accumulating total of lives lost in wars and conflicts. I actually have a childhood friend whose brother is an internationally recognized expert in the quantitative analysis of mass human-rights abuses, like genocides. How horrifying that there is a need for such an expert.

Photo credit to Laura Purdie Salas

Without Peace

Quick fingers 
calculate
with slick, clicking
beads
Counting lives lost
Collective sorrow

Molly Hogan (c) 2017

Students sprawled about the room, reading independently, and I sat criss cross applesauce, working down on the rug with a strategy group. Other than our low voices, there was no talking in the room. As I finished up, I sent my group members back to their independent reading, and the sound of intense, hushed conversation caught my ear. Looking across the room, I saw two boys, heads bent over a book, chatting urgently. I approached.

“What’s up, guys?” I asked.

“Mrs. Hogan! There’s an inappropriate word in C’s book!” blurted Max, who could be considered a budding classroom authority on such words.

I looked down at John, the consummate rule follower, and he nodded vigorously, eyes wide.

“What is it?” I asked, already considering the possibilities.

“It’s right here,” John whispered and pointed. I looked down at the page and sure enough, there was the offending word (not one I’d considered, but one I’d now add to my mental list). The sentence referred to “three bitches.” A quick glance at the context and the cover confirmed that the book was (thankfully!) about dogs.

“Oh,” I said, “you guys are right. That is a word that some people use inappropriately, but what it really means is a girl dog.” (And yes, in retrospect, perhaps I should have encouraged them to use context clues to figure that out, but in the moment, I went with nipping this particular conversation in the bud.)

“Oh,” they said and nodded in apparent understanding. John looked relieved.

After a second, Max’s nod slowed and he looked up at me, a slightly puzzled expression on his face, and said, “Son of a girl dog, you mean…”

What? It took a second for that to register, then…

Ack! No! That’s not what I mean!

“No, Max,” I said firmly, “just a girl dog.”.

“Oh,” he said doubtfully, “Ok.”

In the summertime and even on weekends, I indulge myself and go to the bathroom whenever I need to. I know. It’s crazy, right? At any rate, I know where the bathrooms are around town. The library and Lowes have especially nice ones, but somehow when I’m running errands, I always need to use the bathroom at the grocery store. It’s adequate but not particularly inviting. There’s a doorway that opens into a short, narrow corridor with a men’s room to the right and a women’s room at the end. Invariably, I am not the only one who needs to use “the facilities”, as my Dad calls them, and there is often a short line. This may shock you, but the line is always to the women’s room. And another potential shocker: When I’m desperate, I tend to slip into the men’s room rather than wait.

Recently, after parking my loaded grocery cart off to the side, I headed into that familiar corridor. No line! I reached for the door handle and turned, but it didn’t budge. Locked, darn it. Oh, well, I wasn’t in dire straits. I’d just have to wait a little bit. After about a minute, a woman opened the door to the corridor behind me and got into line.

“There’s always a line here, ” she said, smiling.

“I know,” I said, commiserating. “Sometimes I just use the men’s room.”

“Me, too,” she said.

We continued to wait, awkwardly lined up in the corridor. Another minute or so passed.  I looked consideringly at the men’s room door. This was taking longer than expected.

“Maybe I should use the men’s room today, ” I said, breaking the silence. Then suddenly, we heard the muted but telltale sounds of a toilet flushing. “Oh, wait! That sounds promising.”

More rustling sounds emerged from the bathroom and then the hand dryer blasted.

Still we waited. We looked at each other and shrugged. I gave the men’s room door another wistful glance.

Finally, we heard the jiggle of the handle and the door started opening. Perking up, we moved to the side to make room for the person exiting. Bit by bit, the door swung slowly open, until, much to our mutual surprise…an elderly man emerged! My fellow wait-er and I made eye contact, our eyes wide. In contrast, the man assiduously avoided our eyes, moved rapidly down the hallway and quickly exited through the door. As soon as he was gone, we turned to each other and burst out laughing.

“Well, that was unexpected!” she said.

Another day, another new-to-me poet (and a professional violinist!). I hope you enjoy these two beauties as much as I did.

Swallows

–Leonora Speyer

And here’s another delight:

A Gift

I missed the Roundup last week so I’m reposting to this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup, hosted by the wonderful Michelle Barnes at Today’s Little Ditty.

In the blue ceramic bowl
on the kitchen floor
the cat food sits
untouched
each morning
a jolting reminder that
outside beneath the apple tree
two small mounds
of fresh-turned soil
slowly settle

Molly Hogan (c) 2017

It’s been a very sad week at our house. We had to put our cat, Ling Ling, down on Monday and our cat, Tunafish, on Tuesday. I still haven’t been able to bring myself to clean out their food bowl.

To read more poetry this week, head on over to Kathryn Apel’s blog where she hosts the Poetry Friday Roundup this week, Aussie style!

I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of participating in Laura P. Salas’s 15 Words Or Less Poetry Challenge.  Each Thursday she posts a photo prompt and shares her first draft  poem. The idea is to “wake up your poetry brain” by writing your response to the photo and sharing it. It’s intended as a fun, low-stakes, creative exercise.

This week’s  photo prompt was a picture of a sculpture of a leopard from the Minnesota Zoo.

Photo credit to Laura P. Salas

You can read her delightfully dark poem and other responses here. This is my first draft effort:

Menace

No jaunty polka dots
can camouflage the
lethal grace and
coiled muscles
poised to pounce

Molly Hogan (c) 2017

The vet’s words faded in and out. Key phrases caught my ears.
“Kidney levels…off the charts…heroic efforts…even then it’s unlikely…”
He paused and looked at me for a long moment. “It would be a kindness,” he finally said.

I stroked my cat’s soft fur and my eyes filled and my heart ached. I remembered her as a small fuzzy kitten, skittering about the house. Then, later, as the valiant cat who had recovered from serious injury and re-adjusted to life on three working legs. The cat who greeted me each morning and afternoon. The one who raced to the kitchen whenever a deli bag wrinkled, to beg desperately for sliced ham. The one who meowed plaintively from the hallway when she felt it was time for me to go to bed, and who slept snuggled by my side. Who purred contentedly as I stroked her in the dark hours when insomnia visited. And now I cradled my featherweight cat in my arms, feeling the weight of her years. After a moment, I looked at the vet and I nodded, marking the beginning of the end of seventeen years of our togetherness.

Later, as the poison flowed into her veins, I held her body in my arms, pet her, and wept, whispering to her.

“Thank you, sweet Ling Ling. You were the best.”

“I’m going to miss you so much.”

“You won’t hurt anymore, sweet girl.”

I kissed the top of her head three times, once for each of my children, saying softly, “This is from Connor. This is from Addie. This is from Lyddie.”

And then it was over. Oh, so quickly.

Last night, we buried her under the apple tree.

While I was running earlier this week, I was reminiscing about my summer and thinking how thoroughly I’d enjoyed it. The first several lines of this poem popped into my mind, and the rest soon followed. Once home, I jotted it all down and played around with it a bit. With roots in my summer fun and a nod to Eve Merriam’s inspiring poem How To Eat A Poem, here it is:

How to Eat A Summer

I gobbled up summer
like Eve Merriam
might eat a poem
taking greedy bites
so luscious juicy streams
escaped my lips
rolled down my chin
then fell in bright sticky drops
onto my outspread fingers
from which I licked up
every delicious bit

There was nothing left
to throw away

Molly Hogan (c) 2017

For this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup, head on over to Jone Rush McCulloch’s blog, Check It Out. Don’t forget to bring your appetite!

I’m not going to lie*. Part of me is dreading the beginning of the school year. A big part. I’ve been ignoring it a bit, but the feeling creeps up behind me when I least expect it–kind of like a rogue wave crashing down on you when your back is turned toward the ocean. You’re enjoying the feel on the sun on your shoulders, blissing out on the mellow day, when….WHAM! That realization strikes: School starts in just a few weeks.

As that date looms ever nearer, I know that it’s the mornings I will miss the most, these carefree summer mornings. I love to get up early and enjoy my coffee, catch up on e-mails and Facebook, write, and, if the mood strikes, go for a run. I hang out on the back porch. I take pictures. I don’t look at the clock.  I’m just not ready to lose these slow-paced mornings when each day unfolds at its own glorious pace. I know how they will change once school starts: I can feel it in my bones.

And yet, a significant part of me is excited to get back to school. I love working with my students and my colleagues. I love the excitement of learning and growing together. I just am not looking forward to the relentlessness of the pace. I don’t want to spend every day working, or feeling like I should be working. I don’t want to start each day rushing, feeling like I’m already behind.

Part of me hesitated to share this post, because I feel like I’m a “bad” teacher for feeling this way–like if I were truly passionate and committed, I would only feel excited about the approaching year. I’d be brimming with ideas and enthusiasms. Honestly, I do have those feelings as well. I know that once I’m in my classroom and getting to know my students, I’m going to be happy to be there. I do have new ideas and things I can’t wait to share with my class. But I also am feeling very protective of my personal life and of the ways I nurture myself and enjoy time with family and friends. The intensity of teaching allows for so little of that.

This is my tenth year teaching. Before I started, I knew that balancing home and school would be very challenging. I’d heard about the time demands and stress, I knew my own nature, and I recognized already that this would be a difficult balancing act for me. It was then, and it still is now.

There’s a teacher I know who used to work on Friday night straight through. I mean straight through. She worked until she was tired, slept a while and then continued to work until sometime Saturday morning when she left. Apparently, this was her solution to the problem of work spilling into her weekend. Due to changes in the school’s alarm system, she can no longer do this, and I’m not sure what her current approach is, but isn’t it crazy that part of me sees this as a viable solution?  My own solution has been to wake up ever earlier as the year proceeds (and the work piles up) so that I have some down time each morning before I start working. But waking up at 4:30 or even 4:15 perpetuates a vicious cycle. If I’m up that early, and don’t get home til 5:30 or so, I have no extra energy to work at home during the evening.  If I don’t work in the evening, I feel like I need to fit in a fair chunk of work in the morning. See how that works? I’m starting to feel like I’m in a Laura Numeroff book! So, instead of just complaining about it, how do I change this? I don’t have an answer, but, believe me, I’m thinking a lot about it!

So,  yeah, I’m feeling that “August is the Sunday night of the Summer for Teachers” thing. I’m not gonna lie.

*A week or two ago, Linda Mitchell hosted Poetry Friday Roundup and offered a wonderful array of starting lines for people to use in poems. This one has stuck with me and I’m using it to begin this slice instead. Thanks, Linda!