Tag Archives: Poetry Friday

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Seeking small doses of joy

These days, more than ever, I’m following Mary Oliver’s advice and actively looking to be astonished and stand in wonder. The opportunities are there if you “pay attention”, and I need the counterbalance. So, I’m actively tuning myself to the joy channel, trying to notice and linger in such moments–this morning’s moonlight streaming through a frosty window…the daily sunrise…mist rising from the river as I cross the bridge on a frigid morning…the laughter of children reveling in the new fallen snow at recess…the steady warmth of the wood stove’s heat on my back as I write…so many small moments of wonder! And here was another one:

Taking the trash out on a January morning

I step outside into bitter cold
into clear, clean air
and a glow in the west
The moon hides below
the tops of snow-sugared pines
and casts a diffuse light heavenward

In the east the sun rises
in purples and reds
smudged with charcoal clouds
a canvas for the stark elegance
of winter trees

After hoisting the trash into the bin
I turn carefully
on the ice coated driveway
west to east,  moon to sun
and then again
east to west, sun to moon

I turn and turn and turn

dizzy with the glory of it all 

©Molly Hogan

I hope that your days offer up small wonders to notice and be astonished by, and that they act as a balm in these bruising times.

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at her blog, The Poem Farm.

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PF: A Pantoum

Somehow January has flown by. I just realized that I haven’t managed to show up for Poetry Friday more than once. Yikes! That’s a trend I intend to break, so I’m showing up a day late to the gathering.

I love when Pádraig Ó Tuama reminds me to try out a pantoum (here). His formula always yields interesting results. He says to write 8 lines, number them and put them into this order: 1,2,3,4 2,5,4,6 5,7,6,8 7,3,8,1. Then he says, “As lines repeat, feel free to punk them up a bit.” So here’s my pantoum-ish poem:

New Year’s Day

I forgot to watch for the first bird
I watch the snow fall instead
The trees shiver, draped in winter white and
we have eight blue birds at the feeder

I watch the snow fall
Even inside, the air by the windows is cold
While blue birds come and go from the feeder
my pen stumbles and starts

The air by the windows remains cold
As the moon descends, the sun peeks over the horizon
My pen stumbles and starts
The stack of firewood is getting low

The moon has disappeared: the sun peeks over the horizon
The trees are graceful, draped in winter white
The stack of firewood is getting low
I forgot to watch for the first bird

©Molly Hogan, draft

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Tabatha at her blog, The Opposite of Indifference.

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PF: January

This month our Inklings challenge came from Catherine Flynn. She invited us to write a poem beginning with either “This is January” or “January.” My thoughts immediately turned to John Updike’s poem “January” and it’s first stanza, which eloquently sums up what our days are like during a Maine winter:

The days are short,
The sun a spark,
Hung thin between
The dark and dark.

Inspired by this poem, I first tried writing some rhyming verses, but that fizzled out pretty quickly. Then, when I woke early on New Year’s Day, it was snowing. It was unexpected and oh, so lovely.

January

begins with the slow hush
of snowfall
dark skies brighten with
lacy flakes tracing
their earthbound migration

A peaceful gathering

©Molly Hogan

I’m hoping for many tranquil, peaceful moments for us all during this coming year.

Catherine is hosting the Poetry Friday Roundup this week at her blog, Reading to the Core, and you can read her response to the prompt there. If you want to see what the other Inklings did with this challenge, click on the links below.

Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Linda @A Word Edgewise
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Heidi @my juicy little universe

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PF: Duality

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Tricia at her blog, The Miss Rumphius Effect. She’s sharing the Poetry Sisters’ most recent challenge, writing poems of peace, light or hope. By chance, my post fits right in with this challenge–a happy coincidence! Here’s my image poem to end the year. Something to ponder.

Duality

The light
that kindles ice
to sparkling heart
is also the catalyst
for its inevitable
melting

©Molly Hogan, draft

Wishing everyone love and light during this holiday season!

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Wordle Poems

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.

©Molly Hogan

Wordle guesses: grace, point, slunk, funny, bunny

Grant yourself grace

when you wish yourself
elsewhere
wonder what’s the point
and why you haven’t
already slunk far away
from the current scene.

It’s a funny thing
how we join the conga line
or bunny hop along with the herd
even as we yearn
for other places
or spaces
for oases of calm.

©Molly Hogan

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!

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PF: Inklings Challenge: Your Slip is Showing

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.

©Molly Hogan

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.

©Molly Hogan

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.

©Molly Hogan

If you’re interested in seeing what the rest of the Inklings did with this challenge, click on the links below:

Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Linda @A Word Edgewise
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Heidi @my juicy little universe

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!

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PF: Night at the Museum

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

©Molly Hogan

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Janice Scully at her blog, Salt City Verse.

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PF: A different sort of blessing

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.

©Molly Hogan, draft

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Carol at her blog, The Apples in My Orchard.

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PF: Image Poems

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

©Molly Hogan

Autumn Striptease

brazen tree
shimmies in the breeze
preparing to shift and drop
her scarlet veil of leaves
one
by
one

a tantalizing
slow motion release

until her limbs
lay bare
for all to see

©Molly Hogan

I hope that fall is offering you beautiful moments as well, and some time to enjoy them.

This week’s Poetry Friday Round up is hosted by Jone Rush McCulloch.

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Flurry, Float and Fly! The Story of a Snowstorm

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’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Sarah Grace Tuttle!