Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Jasmine tea takes me back to our honeymoon in San Francisco when I was falling in love with everything… The Japanese Tea Garden surrounded by green, blooming with wisteria, iris, and maple blossoms. We sampled green tea, all flavors; jasmine was my favorite. We walked hand in hand, called each other Mr. and Mrs., and felt the hope of a new path before us.
Now in this time of quarantine, someone said tea is good for you. Who cares if it’s a hoax. I’ve heated the water, dropped in a filtered circle of jasmine tea, squeezed lemon from our backyard lemon tree,
and sip the taste of San Francisco trying hard to remember that love is enough.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Yesterday I read Sally Donnelly’s post about choosing a color to represent this time. She quoted an artist who represented the 9/11 tragedy with the color blue. Read her post here.
I started thinking about the color I would pick, and it has to be green. This is the time of year when green appears in all its amazing shades in my backyard. The cypress trees are bursting with a bright neon green.
Looking up through the cypress trees
Live oak trees lose their leaves in the spring as new leaves emerge.
Grandmother Live Oak bursting with spring growth
I am passing my stay-at-home time on my back deck, listening to wind chimes and watching for the occasional boat. And sometimes a poem comes. Using Irene Latham’s prompt from Laura Shovan’s #Waterpoemproject, I wrote this quick ditty.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Poetry Friday round-up is Michelle Kogan. Click over to join the round up and to read poems from The Best of Today’s Little Ditty, including one of mine.
Ethical ELA posts a 5 day Poetry Challenge each month. (Next month, there will be a prompt every day for National Poetry Month.) This month I participated in only two days, but I shared one of the activities with my students this week on our Kidblog site.
Click here to see the full prompt from Jennifer Goyer-Jowett.
Her prompt included finding a Japanese character to write a haiku from. I chose river. (There isn’t one for bayou.)
Kawa
In the process of finding this character, I discovered the Japanese word Kawaakari which means the gleam of last light on a river’s surface at dusk.
Last light of first day glows like any other, yet gleam lingers longer.
Margaret Simon, draft
Knowing my student Madison would jump on this prompt (she loves all things Japanese), I posted the prompt to my class Kidblog site. I’m sharing their wonderful responses.
Ember’s graceful flight,
Sparks fly, blizzards and tornadoes
of dire fire.
Madison, 6th grade
Mizu means water
Maddox, 5th grade, wrote “The Japanese character I chose is mizu which stands for water. It represents the fluid flowing and the formless things in the world.”
fluid flowing streams
flowing in the wild forest
complete harmony
Maddox, 5th grade
A.J., 6th grade, chose tree.
Standing tall and firm,
Strong arms supporting small twigs,
Uneven Fractal.
A. J., 6th grade
Breighlynn, 4th grade wrote, “My Japanese character is Kaze. Kaze is for wind. It represents Freedom of movement.”
Welcome to This Photo Wants to be a Poem, a way to wake up your poetry brain. Please write a short poem (15 words or fewer) in the comments. Try to comment on other poems as well. Spread the word through sharing the link on social media.
I’ve been following Kim’s blog for a few years. We’ve never met face to face, but we’ve connect through National Writing Project and #clmooc and Slice of Life with Two Writing Teachers. I love how connections can be made across the continent. Kim lives near San Diego, California. She posts beach pictures often and is quite an amazing photographer. In this post here, she photographed a great white egret in her neighborhood.
See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
With an open schedule on Monday, I decided to try to make my own instructional video from my book Bayou Song. I recorded it on my back deck with the Bayou Teche in the background. It wasn’t terrible, so I posted it. (I need to figure out where to look.)
My students are set up on Kidblogs, so I posted the video there and had a few poetic responses. With so many students out of school, I hope more will join in and write poems. Feel free to share.
I see kind-loving warm-snuggling happy-smiling PERSON
by Karson
Best-soccer-defending, Award-winning, Newspaper-mentioning, me-being. Not-caring, free-going, not-quite-all-knowing, random-fact-blurting. Book-writing, comic-drawing, manga-reading, creativity-and-craft-showing. This is me, even if you dislike it, then that’s you- and I’ll tell you what. That’s that.
Welcome to This Photo Wants to be a Poem, a way to wake up your poetry brain. Please write a short poem (15 words or fewer) in the comments. Try to comment on other poems as well. Spread the word through sharing the link on social media.
Supermoon by Paula Bourque, used by permission.
This week’s full moon was known as the Full Worm Moon. Other names for March’s full moon are the Crow Moon, the Crust Moon, the Sap Moon, and the Lenten Moon.
This week’s moon was also a supermoon, meaning the fullness coincided with the moon at its closest point to Earth making it appear larger.
Moon, moon, as you draw closer I feel safer knowing you’re watching over me.
It’s another month, so that means a new challenge for the Sunday Night Poetry Swaggers. This month I posed the challenge of writing a question poem.
I had some pretty feeble starts at this one, but one day last week I was inspired by the very thing happening in our wood duck house. Last year we put up a wood duck house around this time of year, but the first clutch never hatched. We are watching through a Ring doorbell camera attached to the roof of the nest box.
We have another hen. She’s been sitting since February 24th, so projected hatch date is somewhere between March 16th and 18th. I have a good feeling about this hen. Even though we’ve had some cool nights, she sits all night and leaves once in the morning and once in the evening to feed. When she leaves, she completely covers the clutch with down, so we really have no idea how many eggs she is sitting on. We learned our lesson last year, so we will Not be going out there to check.
Stay tuned. In the meantime, my question poem.
Will She Come Again?
It’s February and we wonder will she come again, this wood duck mother hen?
Will she find the house we’ve built? a box, like a cypress quilt, waiting to be a home.
In the morning we look and see. Papa wood duck, where is she? Where’s your mate? Is she about?
Connected to our house WiFi, we keep a daily eye, a camera on the nestbox roof.
She’s in, then out, then in again, this mother wood duck hen. Will she lay a clutch?
How many eggs? It’s hard to tell. She covers them all so well. Plucks her down, soft and warm.
How does she know how? Waiting, watching, wondering now for twenty-eight more days.
If you were in or close to any school on Monday, March 2nd, you may have seen kids dressed like Dr. Seuss characters. I had on a red t-shirt that said “Teacher One” and a bright blue feather hat. March 2nd is Dr. Seuss’s birthday. The celebration has been turned into Read Across America Day.
With Dr. Seuss on my mind, I saw this image on Facebook, but I had no idea there was a connection. Katherine Conley, otherwise known as “Other Katherine” when she was roommates with my daughter Katherine, was vacationing in La Jolla, California. She told me that there are signs of Dr. Seuss everywhere as Theodor Geisel lived there for a time and was inspired by the landscape to create The Lorax. I won’t continue the rabbit hole I fell down, but if you care to, I found some information here.
La Jolla Cove photo by Katherine Conley
Please leave a 15 word or less poem in the comments and leave comments for other writers. This is a low stress writing prompt. Just go with your gut. Whatever comes is worthy.
Sometimes I wear flowers. Sometimes I sing. Sometimes I just pause.
Linda Baie shared a video on Facebook that I immediately took up as a writing prompt. It’s a beautiful short film by Louie Schwartzberg. (See link below to watch the video)
I took a quote from the young girl at the beginning and made a golden shovel. “The path could lead to a beach or something.”
Cultivate a response to the day; open your eyes and a path could be there, weather could change, and lead to water, to a new way to see, a gift as joyful as a beach, waves blessing you or moving you to touch something.
Margaret Simon, draft response
Photo by Margaret Simon, Santa Rosa Beach Florida
Kathy Mazurowski is the winner of the book giveaway for After Dark: Poems About Nocturnal Animals by David L. Harrison, illustrated by Stephanie Laberis. Click the link to read how I used the book with my students and wrote nonfiction poems.
Take a minute to write a quick 15 word poem to this week’s This Photo Wants to be a Poem. This week is a beautiful photo by Molly Hogan.
Welcome to This Photo Wants to be a Poem, a low stress weekly poetic writing prompt. This week’s photo is courtesy of Molly Hogan, who is an amazing photographer/ poet/ teacher in Maine. She has sent me a few photos for this weekly prompt. (If you would like to offer any photos, please send me an email. You will get credit, but the photos will be free for reuse.)
In keeping with Laura Purdie Salas’s 15 Words or Less prompts, I encourage you to write a quick short poem. To help build a supportive community, please comment on three poems with an encouraging response.
photo by Molly Hogan
A soul in solitary silence seeks a soft whisper of solace.
Margaret Simon, draft
Your turn. Leave your poem draft in the comments. Thanks!
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.
Reflections on the Teche 