Our Sunday night Poetry Swaggers group is posting today with a challenge from Molly Hogan. “This month, I invite you to reinvent the world around you (or one aspect of it) by shifting your lens to see the beauty in what at first seems to be ugly or unnoteworthy.”
Nothing was ugly
Naomi Shihab Nye, A Valentine for Ernest Mann
just because the world said so.
Molly quoted Naomi Shihab Nye who says,
“Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us,
we find poems.” All we need to do is shift our focus a bit to find beauty in the everyday, otherwise passed-over things.
There are signs
Margaret Simon, draft 2019
on the door
fingerprints,
peeling paint.
We’ve been here,
so have they-
gone now
the way of time.
The Smell of Morning
Sagging fog, thick on the morning,
captures the scent of my walk.Someone is running the dryer
blowing Downy air.Every morning, he smokes a cigar
on his front porch, white rocker,
booted feet propped on the railing.
He waves and with it comes
a pungent smell of burning wood–a home scent.Beneath my feet, pine needles crunch
releasing a breath of Christmas.
My mother would gather them
to mulch the flower beds for winter.As I walk, I practice my deep
Margaret Simon, draft 2019
yoga breath, in, hold, out, hold,
pausing to savor the ordinary,
extraordinary scents of the day.
Be sure to visit the other Swaggers today to enjoy more beauty in the ugly.
Catherine Flynn: Reading to the Core
Heidi Mordhorst: My Juicy Little Universe
Linda Mitchell: A Word Edgewise
Molly Hogan: Nix the Comfort Zone
Reflections on the Teche 