I start every day with Wordle. It’s a guaranteed morning pleasure…and an occasional frustration. I extend the pleasure each morning by gathering up my guesses and trying to create poems from them. It’s a low-stakes and fun way to generate some poetry in my notebook. I find the combination of words can force me to make interesting and surprising connections I would never have considered otherwise. Here are a couple of recent efforts.
Wordle guesses: alter, spell, whelk, wield
To alter your world
emerge from the hypnotic spell of the in-and-out tide of the banal.
Spiral your shell into gorgeous intricacy, like a whelk wielding basic elements to create complex beauty.
Thoughts of the bunny hop led me back to happy childhood memories and a bit of a rabbit hole (ha!) on the internet. Enjoy!
This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Linda Mitchell at her blog, A Word Edgewise. She’s sharing a delightfully creative December mash-up! Be sure to check it out!
This month Heidi had our Inklings’ challenge and she invited us to “address an item of our clothing.” I debated about an ode to socks, as I am quite a fan, but swiftly opted toward more intimate apparel.
I played around with a variety of forms, trying to do justice to slips and half-slips.
How about a little terse verse? What do you call a slip with a bit of spandex? a hip grip
Ugh…that is not inspiring!
Maybe a limerick?
There once was a woman who tried with a whisper of fabric to hide any clinging or bulging that could be divulging her truest form to the outside.
That one sounded more like a girdle than a slip…which reminded me of my grandmother unfolding herself from the car after a long ride from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, bemoaning the pressure of her girdle. “You’ll see what it’s like someday,” she said to me. Despite her dire prediction, I never did… and she never witnessed them becoming an outer rather than inner garment in popular culture. But I digress…
Next, I played around with a Zeno for a while. Those one syllable requirements are tricky!
Half Slip
Hidden, provocative or prim, all anti-cling, silken glide. Whispered slither, fabrics slide. Modest so it’s seldom spied.
Finally, I remembered that Margaret Simon had shared a prompt from Joyce Sidman: address an inanimate object and give it a compliment, ask a question, and express a wish. The final few lines of that Zeno had me thinking…
To My Half-Slip
How easily you arbitrate between fabrics, settling disputes about chafing and cling. Cultural change pushed you toward becoming a fashion anachronism. How have you persevered, doing your job behind the scenes as a diligent defender of modesty, enhancer of graceful drape, and a transformer of transparent to opaque? You’re a hidden workhorse disguised as a whisper of silk! And though perhaps it’s ungracious of me, I do have one request– I truly wish you could resist the urge to give in, let go, and slip and show below my hem.
This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Irene Latham at her blog, Live Your Poem, and offers more links to all sorts of poetry goodness. Be sure to stop by and check it out!
It’s been a school year. All 55 days of it. I keep telling myself I’m growing as a teacher. I’m learning a lot. I tell myself that on repeat. (There’s some other looping self-talk going on, too, but I’m not going to share that right now.)
Trying to be proactive, I’ve been adding things to my weeknight schedule, deliberately creating some time out of the vortex of school. I noticed an upcoming event at the Portland Museum of Art and planned to attend, registering for a free one hour ekphrastic poetry class.
I called my daughter, Lydia, and asked if she wanted to meet for dinner and go to the museum beforehand. My husband opted to join us, and I looked forward to the event all week. A little breathing room.
Then I had one of the worst teaching days of my life. Enough said. I was desperate to escape into an evening out; however, by the end of that “terrible, horrible, no good very bad day”, I had no bandwidth for participating in a class. None. The idea of listening to someone talk about, well, anything, and then putting myself out there with some strangers was, in that moment, horrifying. It wasn’t an option.
So, after dinner, we walked over to the museum. I touched base with the volunteer at the desk to free up my space in the class in case someone else wanted to join. I, then, breathed a huge sigh of relief.
While Kurt wandered, Lydia and I decided to check out the erasure poetry center set up in the museum’s Great Hall. They had supplied printed pages and pencils. We reached through the crowded area to the materials, randomly selecting a page each, then settled in to create our poems. Here’s what I came up with:
When A Country Discards Empathy
no hint of human empty still and silent distance visible dissolving fidelity
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to spend time with my sister and most of her family. They were meeting up in Boston and we spontaneously decided to join them. We had such a lovely time. Our group went out for a delicious Indian dinner and there was a moment, a small one, overseen, that has stuck with me.
Even though we didn’t say grace before our meal
At the end of the table at the restaurant my nieces, adults now, smile and chat.
My sister glances at them then turns to her husband with a warm smile containing a world of pregnancies, late nights, worries and wonders. So many shared experiences. He returns her smile.
The girls tilt back their heads, and their laughter spills, golden, into the night air. Rising like a blessing.
It’s day 41 of the school year (Who’s counting? lol), and I’m still adjusting to the back-in-school pace. Taking pictures helps me escape from the whirlwind, and calms and centers me. Mostly I’m photographing on the weekends, but sometimes, like with the double rainbow, a photo moment steals into the work week. Sometimes, in a lovely added benefit, the photos themselves serve as a springboard into poems. The first one was inspired by Georgia Heard’s prompt, “If the wind painted the sky, what colors would it choose?”
After a lashing tumult of rain and hail Wind offers Sky an apology
I was delighted to have a chance to share Laura Purdie Salas’s upcoming “Flurry, Float and Fly! The Story of a Snowstorm” with my second grade students recently. As Maine residents, we’re all well-versed in snow, so would they be the perfect audience for a snowy book or a snow-jaded lot?
As we settled in to read, the book quickly grabbed their attention. It is a gorgeous match between words and images. The rhyming was so well-crafted, that it took them a while to notice it, and they were delighted when they did. It really is masterfully done! Here’s the jet stream described oh-so-efficiently and oh-so-poetically: “From the north, a polar freeze…
from the south, a humid breeze…
All winds advance. The mix and dance. “
The kids oohed and aahed over several of the spreads, including this one:
illustration by Chiara Fedele
“The words go down, down, down….Just like snow!” one student gushed. On another spread, they loved how Laura spaced her words across the page and greatly admired her use of ellipses ( a favorite second grade form of punctuation!). On other pages students noticed how Laura used larger font and capitals to make words pop out. By the end of the book, my students were chanting along with the refrain, “flurry, float and fly.”
As we discussed the book, they asked me to turn back to this next page again and again. It captures the magic of early morning snow and the arrangement of words and those lovely ellipses invite you to linger…to slow down and just take it all in.
As a bonus, there are several pages of back matter to dig into. In them, the science of snow is beautifully and clearly articulated, with explanations of the jet stream and snowflake formation and well-chosen illustrations. We didn’t have a chance to dig into these pages yet, but I’m already thinking how I will use them to model some powerful non-fiction reading and thinking.
Most of all, my students fell into the wonder of the book and its snowstorm. As Laura noted, “I know that science underpins its beauty, but it’s still magic, falling silently, gracefully, from the sky.” My students agreed, and there wasn’t a jaded one among them! Laura’s words and Chiara’s illustrations wove a spell of a beautiful snowfall on a very warm fall day. My active semi-chaotic class was lulled by Laura and Chiara’s collaboration into a temporarily peaceful state.
Perhaps I’ll read it again tomorrow!
Note: It’s due for release on November 11th, so you will also have the chance to enjoy it soon!
An additional side note: If you haven’t ever had a chance to read Laura’s book, Finding Family: The Duckling Raised by Loons, I highly recommend that you do! Published in 2023, it’s already become a a must read in my classroom. Kids are fascinated by the story and it sparks some wonderful discussions about family.
This week has been a doozy. I’m chiming in with a little poem in praise of Autumn, and with thanks to Georgia Heard‘s October prompt calendar for inspiration.
Autumn
If I chose words to hang upon an autumn tree I’d write dazzle tremble release and flutterfall
This month Margaret posed our Inklings challenge. She matched us up with partners and instructed us to send images to each other and write a poem sparked by the image we received. Catherine Flynn was my partner and she sent me three photos to choose between. I struggled to chose which picture to use, but kept coming back to this one:
Hope is a cluster of eggs nestled together. Exquisite promise cradled in the terrifying fragility of three thin shells.
These days, as our country mutates into something foul and ignoble, I turn to Nature again and again to find solace. Sometimes I feel almost desperate in my search for a peaceful distraction. It reminds me of the fledglings I see at our feeders in the spring, fluttering their wings insistently in a drumbeat of demand. “Feed me! Feed me!” they insist, over and over again, as the adult birds patiently tend to them. Somedays, I feel like I owe Mother Nature a big apology for my ongoing neediness. She definitely has my gratitude.
These days, I’ve also been rereading Wendell Berry’s well-known “The Peace of Wild Things.” It’s a poem I’ve turned to again and again over the years. It begins
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things…
I’m so grateful to live in a place where I’m surrounded by beauty. I’m so grateful to be a part of supportive communities.
This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Rose Cappelli at her blog, Imagine the Possibilities. This community is another place where you can find solace.
This month it was my turn to set the Inklings challenge. I suggested that we “write a love note to something or someone or some place.” I shared José A. Alcántara’s Love Note to Silence as a possible mentor, or alternatively, I suggested riffing off of one of Georgia Heard’s June Small Letters calendar prompts.
I recently encountered Alcántara’s poem in an on-line class. The first two stanzas establish the relationship between the poet and silence. Here are the last two stanzas:
But listening to you is like the shore listening to the ocean. I’m swept clean of my detritus, my rotting organic matter, everything tossed there by the rude and the ugly.
Here, let me grab my pen and notebook, my binoculars. Let me slip on my coat and shoes. The sandhill cranes are passing overhead. Let’s go to the fields at the edge of town and make some noise.
Inspired by Alcántara, I considered writing love notes to all sorts of things: paper, grief (really!), the great blue heron, the marsh, hummingbirds, the clock, etc. But I kept coming back to… of all things…chipmunks! They just make me happy. So I went with that.
Love note to a chipmunk
Oh, chipmunk, you harbinger of spring! You’re the racing car of rodents, sleek and striped, you scamper and scurry all rush and hurry as you zip and zoom across and through the tangled garden green or dash into cracks and crevices or scurry up a tree.
You pop up here and there and then appear in yet another spot. Always go, go, going! Until you’re not.
Then you sit in one space with your nuts or fruit or seeds and your clever hands proceed to stuff your face bit by bit by bit until your cheeks are full– stretched beyond belief. You adorable greedy rascal! You’re my dependable comic relief!
How can I not love you? Your acrobatic antics never cease to amuse. Such sassy spunk and acts of derring-do.
Ah, chipmunk, you have a gift for lightness amidst your serious pursuits. An intrepid explorer, you’re bold and brave, finding sustenance and sweetness in every day.
Now that summer’s fading fast away, you’ll soon depart to hibernate beneath the snow, all snug in some cozy cave or den, idling your engine until you can brave the first chilly days of spring.
Then once again, you’ll fling yourself into life with impressive gusto.
And now here’s a little cuteness overload for you from around my home:
As a bonus, I have to include a couple of photos from David Bird, an amazing photographer who has photographed wildlife, including chipmunks, with his own created “Becorns”.
If you’re interested in seeing what the other Inklings did with this prompt, please check on the links below:
This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Margaret Simon at her blog, Reflections on the Teche, where she shares her own love note.
*Please note that there’s a typo in that on line version, but I can’t find it anywhere else. It should read “sandhill cranes” in the fourth stanza, NOT “handheld cranes”!
Nix the comfort zone 