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 
I don’t know why….but the line, “someone is running the dryer” gets me. I think of all the times I’m on a walk and I smell that scent and I think about a stranger doing the work of life near me. I don’t know if I can explain it. I like that line so much. And, fingerprints on the door of an old house no one lives in. What stories there. Lovely response to the prompt, Margaret.
This is so lovely, Margaret, both poems. But I especially love
Someone is running the dryer
blowing Downy air.
Yes! And the whole idea of finding beauty, whether we literally see the things as more beautiful or simply turn them into beautiful poems. If our response is love and art, the object itself has to be loved and artful.
maybe we have become too predictable, we have an idea of what we like and we refuse to move from it, maybe we are just all lazy….
Oh, those scents.. I especially love the breath of Christmas. And I’ve long been fascinated with plants that seem to grow in impossible places.
[…] Simon: Reflections on the Teche Catherine Flynn: Reading to the Core Linda Mitchell: A Word Edgewise Heidi Mordhorst: My Juicy […]
Your first poem really gets me, Margaret. I wanted to pick one line as a favorite, but couldn’t. It has such a nostalgic, time-suffused feel. I love the scents that infuse your second poem, and how you set the scene with those first two lines. Great response to the challenge!
Such vivid images, Margaret; piercingly real. Photos so captivating. I love dilapidated houses. I always imagine the stories absorbed by those walls.
Your photos and poems both teach and reteach the lesson of attention and noticing. The patterns of color in the peeling paint, the scents of a morning walk, the humanity of an individual previously cast as just one in a number of deplorables…attention is #kindness, attention leads to #justice. Thank you, Margaret.
Beautiful “looking’ as you walk, Margaret. I love finding interesting windows & your abandoned house picture brings up so many questions about the lives that were there, “so have they”. Then, I loved that you focused on the scent in the second poem, “a breath of Christmas.”
Downy air!!!!
I smell that almost every morning on my walk, and it …somehow comforts me, in an obscure way. Somewhere, someone else is getting on with things, and …with those extraordinary scents, all is well, and all manner of things will be well…
Your second poem brings up the feeling of riding the motorcycle…the smells that are not accessible in the car are there on a motorcycle, or your walk, bringing you closer to the world. Loved both.
I love both of these poems, Margaret. The first reminds me of a house I used to drive by when we lived in Maine. I always wondered about who lived there in the past and why the house was abandoned. Now I wonder if the house is still there at all. And all those scents you captured in your second poem! Thank you for the reminder to “savor the ordinary,/extraordinary scents of the day.”
I also love the “ordinary,/extraordinary!” You ladies have opened my eyes this week! THANKS!
Reading all the Swaggers’ poems today reminds me of some of the poems for Carol Hinz’s Finding Beauty challenge, including yours and Linda’s! You’ve delighted all of my senses with this one, Margaret—the sagging fog, Downy air, pine needle crunch… wonderful imagery through and through.
I love this. Thank you. Ruth, thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com