I am linking up today to It’s Monday, What are you Reading on Jen Vincent’s site, Teach Mentor Texts. Click on the image to find more blog Kidlit reviews.
With new grandsons to read aloud to, I have taken an interest in books that have rhythmic, poetic language. The words have to go quickly as Leo’s favorite part is turning the page. Buffy Silverman’s new release is just this kind of book. With quick rhyming verse, she takes us through a snow-melting day.
In my part of the world, South Louisiana, we do not get much snow. Yet, we have chickadees at the feeder all winter long. With lively and sharp photographs and bouncing, rhythmic language, we can learn about places that have a distinct seasonal change. Grand sons can point to the cardinal swooping, the rabbits bouncing, and the foxes pouncing.
On a Snow-Melting Day releases on February 4th, 2020. Hop into a delightful book on a marsh mucking, duck dapping day.
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.”
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.
I pass this dilapidated house often, yet after Molly’s prompt, I noticed the beauty of the plants justing up through the floor boards.
There are signs on the door fingerprints, peeling paint. We’ve been here, so have they- gone now the way of time.
Margaret Simon, draft 2019
Steps to a house in New Orleans. I was struck by the pattern of color in the peeling paint.
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 yoga breath, in, hold, out, hold, pausing to savor the ordinary, extraordinary scents of the day.
Margaret Simon, draft 2019
Be sure to visit the other Swaggers today to enjoy more beauty in the ugly.
My poet-friend and writing group partner, Molly Hogan, is a fine art photographer in her spare time. She lives in Maine and posts amazing photos on her blog and Facebook page. Sometimes her photos inspire me to respond in poetry.
photo by Molly Hogan
Dawn on the Marsh
Dawn on the marsh glows like embers, like the final flash of a torch lighting the tiny particles of fog rising ghost-like and dreamy.
High in the sky geese line up to honk their way south
In the distance, deer graze, tentatively perk their ears to your sound.
You do not feel the cold that numbs your fingers and toes as you click the lens of your camera
Waiting for the Harvest, by Mickey Delcambre. First place in the Sugarcane Festival Photography Contest
Ralph Fletcher’s new book, Focus Lessons, is coming out, so I took advantage of Heinemann’s offer to read a sample.
There are strong links between photography and writing. This is true in substance and process, as well as language. The world of photography provides a visual, concrete language (angle, focus, point of view, close-up, panorama) that is enormously helpful in teaching writing.
Ralph Fletcher, Focus Lessons
When I saw Mickey Delcambre’s photo on my Facebook page, I was compelled to write a haiku.
Equinox harvest– Slow down days, long resting nights Autumn changes time.
Margaret Simon, draft, 2019
On Monday, I talked with my students about the Fall Equinox. I was surprised how well they know the solstices, but they were less familiar with the meaning of equinox.
In New Iberia this weekend, there is the annual Sugarcane Festival, celebrated on the last weekend of September as harvesting begins. We only have to look out of the window to see the tall cane waving in the fields.
One of the Craft Lessons included in the book sample focuses on Mood. Ralph explains how mood can be expressed in a photograph as well as in writing. I look forward to finding more crossovers between photography and writing Ralph says, “Photography is writing with light.”
I put Mickey’s photograph up and ask my students to do a quick write about it. Our quickwrites are typically 5 minutes. Then we share. Sometimes (it’s always a choice), a quickwrite will become a poem.
Seeing the Days Change
I see the days changing around me, going from day to night and night to day the marks of tires only from the day before seeing the sun go down getting ready for the night, goodnight sun.
Breighlynn, 4th grade
Sugar
Sugar in the fields, still as a cane. Growing, oh so tall, ready for the harvest. Burning leaves make the sweet smelling smoke.
Can you smell the sugar? Smelling, oh so sweet. Have you ever eaten the cane? As pure as sugar comes.
A.J., 6th grade
This morning on my morning walk I smelled the sweet air that A. J. wrote about. One of the gifts of fall.
See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life
Last week I read my teacher-blogger-writer-friend Molly Hogan’s Slice of Life post. It touched the poet in me. Molly wakes early and goes on photography quests. When we’re lucky, she takes us along on her Facebook posts or blog. Last week she wrote this post entitled A Generous Morning.
Inspired, I copied her words into a found poem. Her generous morning became my generous morning. That’s how it works with creativity; it’s all big magic.
A Generous Morning
Lightening sky in the east as surely as the birds were migrating south, I missed the swallows.
The sky seemed lonely. Then a couple of swallows dart and dive through the air currents, and a bird approaching in the distance-
a heron
Sun rose higher, lit the mist. Cedar waxwings flittered. I watched it all, the generosity of morning.
a found poem by Margaret Simon using Molly Hogan’s words.
We’ve been watching our wood duck nest box for months. The first clutch did not hatch. Overcoming our disappointment, we set out new wood shavings and hoped for the best. By and by, another wood duck hen came in and laid 18 or so eggs. (Maybe it was two hens?) Nevertheless, we watched again. She seemed to be doing it all right, turning the eggs, covering them in down before leaving to feed, and sitting, sitting, sitting.
Yesterday morning my husband texted and said, “Look in the house.” (I am away from home this week.) When I looked at the video on my phone sent from the camera in the nesting box, I saw three dark blobs. At first I was afraid they were dead, but eventually realized that hatching is hard work, so they lay still.
We are both proud parents of 12 wood ducklings. Today was Jump Day. At 7:30 AM, Momma went out and called her babies. They climbed the wire mesh my husband had nailed into the wall nearest the hole. One by one they reached the hole and jumped out.
A poem will come, I’m sure. Yesterday, Laura Purdie Salas posted her 15 Words or Less image and I wrote this little ditty.
Ripple Effect
One egg hatches then another. Soon the whole nest is chattering.
See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life
March Super Moon Photo by Margaret Simon
I am your silent super moon
I light the equinox sky
I touch the tips of trees
I hear nocturnal owls
I whisper secrets to your soul.
I am your silent super moon
I tell the myths of constellations
I cry tears for fading Earth
I pretend to keep my eyes on you.
I pull tides of ocean waves.
I am your silent super moon.
I wonder if I’m magical
I play hide-n-seek with stars
I carry your wishes in my moondust
Sprinkle heaven with hope.
I am your silent super moon.
(c) Margaret Simon
This poem came to me in stages beginning with my morning walk with the super moon earlier this week. I was reminded of this form when Elisabeth Ellington used it to write a response poem to the first poem in my book Bayou Song, I am a Beckoning Brown Bayou. I’ve used the form with students and adults in writing workshops. Here is a template for the form. If you use it to create your own poem or have students respond, let me know. I love to share how Bayou Song inspires on my book Facebook page.
See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life
Vernal Equinox on the Bayou Teche.
Begin with the source,
Lore told again and again,
ancient words from native people–
Teche,
Tesh,
Snake
Water runs through it
brown bayou mud
bound by an ever-eroding shore
Teche,
Tesh,
Snake.
Sun sets on vernal equinox
sends rays of light across
cypress trees reflected in still water
Teche,
Tesh,
Snake.
–Margaret Simon
Reflections
The name of my blog originates with the bayou that runs behind my house. Bayou Teche was so named for an ancient Native American legend that the warriors battled a huge snake for days, and in finally killing it, the giant serpent created a waterway through where it lay. The Bayou Teche meanders back and forth for 125 miles.
We recently joined the T.E.C.H.E. Project,Teche Ecology, Culture and History Education, a nonprofit with a mission to improve the Bayou Teche for recreation as well as for ecosystem health. One of the perks of membership is the gift of a mile marker. Our house is at mile 69.4. We plan to mount the marker on our wood duck house, but we will wait until Eve, our resident mother, finishes her nesting.
The name of my blog has significance to me. It reflects the place where I live along with my own internal reflections about teaching and writing. Literal and figurative reflections on the Teche.
See more Spiritual Thursday posts at Donna’s site, Mainly Write.
Donna is gathering our Spiritual Journey First Thursday posts at her blog. Donna recently moved, so she chose “Home” as our topic for today.
We often look to our church as a spiritual home. But is this the only place where God lives? Like the saying “Home is where the heart is,” God is where the heart is, too. Just because you may not have a place to worship, God’s presence does not leave you. God is in my mind…always.
I also believe that God is in my poetry. Wherever I am, the world opens and reveals poems. This week is only the first week of February, but the temperatures have climbed above 70 degrees, and the Japanese magnolias are blooming. On my early morning walk, I pass a lonely tree in a vacant lot. It’s obviously not trimmed or cared for and in many ways looks like it’s dead, but not this week. So I wrote a poem about it. Of course.
The first stanza is a direct quote from The Time is Now, a weekly writing prompt from Poets and Writers.
ADayonSaturn
A day on Saturn lasts a total of ten hours, thirty-three minutes, and thirty-eight seconds, according to the Astrophysical Journal.
When I pass the Japanese magnolia, I think it must be dying. Lichen clusters on its branches; a hollowed trunk carved like a cave invites infesting insects.
And yet, there they are in the middle of winter, pink blossom buds point to the sky spot Saturn
like an astrolabe aligns the planets, from a leafless display
Margaret Simon lives on the Bayou Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana. She is a retired elementary gifted teacher who writes poetry and children's books. Welcome to a space of peace, poetry, and personal reflection. Walk in kindness.
