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Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

#NPM19 Day 26 What the Heart Knows

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Teaching, Writing, tagged , , on April 26, 2019| 9 Comments »

Poetry Friday round-up is with Carol at Beyond Literacy Link.

One of my favorite books in my rather large collection of poetry books is What the Heart Knows by Joyce Sidman. This week I shared the poem Happiness, a chant invoking happiness.  We talked about writing from the perspective of direct address to an emotion.  I directed my students to choose an emotion and to try using imagery to make the emotion personified.  I played along with my kiddos and took out the magnetic poetry cookie sheets.  Finding the word poems mused me to write a direct address to poems.  Karson and I both used the imagery of a monarch butterfly drawing on our experience of hatching and releasing monarchs this week.

Poems,

You hide in shadows
of oak trees.
You whisper words
in the breeze.
You shudder my heart.

Poems,
When we meet eye to eye,
I am amazed
by your strength,
unexpected yet welcome.

Poems,
Your delicate wings
unfold before our eyes
surprising us
with your ease of flight.

–Margaret Simon, draft, 2019

 

Free image from Pixabay.

 

Excitement,

too much thrill can bring confusion
and confusion leads to mystery.
You are like the breeze on the top of a mountain.
When I see the brightness of the moon, I feel you.
You are the feeling when a monarch flies into the distance.

Karson, 4th grade

 

Curiosity,

You are full of forest mazes
that my mind gets stuck in.
My eyes show the way.
You bring me thoughts,
you make me think,
Curiosity

Jaden, 3rd grade

 

 

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#NPM19 Day 25 Ode to a Gel Pen

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged , , on April 25, 2019| 1 Comment »

I bought a new set of gel pens and shared them with my students.  We had fun writing skinny odes (fold your paper in half and only write to the crease mark), and making zines.  My newest student Rylee, who is a bright first grader, wrote an ode to her dog.  She drew a picture of her dog on her journal page and for her zine decided to cut it out into four parts and glue it on different pages.  I don’t question the creativity of a first grader.

Ode to my Dog


Oh, how I love my dog.

He licks me.
He sits on my lap.

He plays with me.

He is the cutest
dog around.

My dog had to go
somewhere else.

–Rylee, 1st grade

 

Ode to the Glitter Pen

Oh, the glittery life
of an orange gel pen
dipped in sparkly gems.

You write like
glass across the page,

smooth as a soft
silky scarf.

Ink that glows and flows
like orange lip gloss,
tangerine-flavored

lines that bring
sunshine to
this poem.

–Margaret Simon, draft, 2019

 

A page from my zine.

 

 

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#NPM19 Day 24 Monarch Ecloses

Posted in Poetry, tagged , , on April 24, 2019| 1 Comment »

After yesterday’s wood duck egg disappointment, I have a hopeful life-filled poem today in response to what happened this morning in our classroom.  I decided to try a Sedoka form.  Matt Forrest Esenwine shared one on Friday and linked to this resource. 

I looked up monarch information on this site and found two wonderful vocabulary words, eclose (emerge as an adult from the pupa stage) and hemolymph (a fluid like blood in most invertebrates).

 

From a chrysalis
monarch wings eclose
pump hemolymph of color

Watching miracles
with the wonder of a child
classroom butterfly garden

–Margaret Simon

 

 

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Slice of Life: Cruelty of Nature

Posted in Poetry, Slice of Life on April 23, 2019| 11 Comments »

See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life

If you’ve been following our wood duck house, there is sad news.  None of the eggs hatched.  After nearly 40 days, we thought it was time to give up, even though the hen was still sitting on them.  What do you do with such a life lesson?  Write a poem about it.

Nature can be a cruel teacher.
Eggs in a nest box,
how a silly duck hen

will sit for days and days.
Could she smell the rotting?
Did she see the gray shadow growing

cold? Some days nature is so violent
whole trees fall.  They block the road.
They tell us we don’t belong.

Why on earth are we all here?
When birth is so random,
so dependent on the stars

sprinkling miracle dust,
declaring life.
Not today.  When we take the eggs

out of the box, I forget to count.
Toss them into the water,
an afternoon snack for an evil snake

grabbing anything it can for survival.
Survival is not for everything
God makes. Some days

you just have to clean out the box,
add new shavings in,
Begin again.

— Margaret Simon, draft, 2019

 

 

 

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NPM19 Day 22 Earth Day

Posted in Poetry, Writing, tagged , , on April 22, 2019| 2 Comments »

Over the weekend I bought a new magnetic poetry kit, The Edgar Allan Poe version. Lots of words spread out on a cookie sheet. I created an Earth Day haiku.



A discovery walk near our hotel led to a path along Purple Creek, the very creek that ran behind my childhood home. Along the shore were two Canada Geese with 5 little goslings, an Easter morning miracle.

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#NPM19 Day 20 Nest

Posted in Poetry, tagged , , on April 20, 2019| 4 Comments »

In January I taught a workshop about combining poetry and art with Marla Kristicevich at the Acadiana Center for the Arts. This week Marla posted on Facebook her installation for an art show for PACE artists.  She explained that she gathered material around the Bayou Teche.  Her inspiration for the piece combined the nostalgia for place as well as meditation on nature in art.  The image does not show the scale of the work.  Imagine the height of the walls are the size of a person. Today I’m sharing an ekphrastic poem, a poem inspired by art.  You can see the exhibit at the ACA through June 8th.

Nest by Marla Kristicevich

 

An Invitation

Come into my nest.
Enter on a woven path.
Stop for a sip of living water.

Leave nothing
behind.
Just pause,
reflect,
release,

Then move on
so someone else
can move in.

–Margaret Simon (draft) 2019

 

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#NPM19 Day 19 Eudora’s Garden

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, tagged on April 19, 2019| 18 Comments »

Poetry Friday round-up is with Amy at The Poem Farm.

Part of playing with poetry is finding poetry everywhere in every way.  I was reading The Writer’s Almanac on Eudora Welty’s birthday, April 13th.  In the article, there was a list of the seasonal flowers that bloom in Eudora’s garden that was diligently tended by her mother, Chestina.  I collected the flower names and crafted a poem around them.

 

Photo from Calla Lily Dialogues

Walking in Eudora’s Garden

For Eudora Welty, 1909-2001

The optimist’s daughter steps into a garden
of larkspur, writes stories among hollyhocks,
gathers courage from snapdragons.

When summer comes, she celebrates phlox
and zinnias and blue salvia.
Even in autumn, her garden blooms

with asters and chrysanthemums–
a name that rolls from her southern drawl
like creamy froth on café au lait.

Her garden never dies. Winters charm
with camellias and pansies.
The sounds of birds rejoice all year long.

–Margaret Simon (draft) 2019

Author’s note: I grew up in Jackson, MS during Eudora Welty’s lifetime. I once heard her read and was given the opportunity to interview her for a high school project.  She was an elegant, kind woman.

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#NPM19 Day 18 Draft

Posted in Poetry, tagged , , , on April 18, 2019| 7 Comments »

Happy Poem in your Pocket Day!  I am staying close to home today as huge storms are expected, so I will celebrate quietly this year.  I usually carry with me two favorite poems, Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye and Wild Geese by Mary Oliver.

Yesterday I settled into a corner at Fair Grinds coffee in Mid City New Orleans with a vanilla latte and my journal.  Christie Wyman is playing along with poetry this month.  She’d noticed that I often label my poems with the word “draft” and a friend of hers thought that made the poem seem alive.  Working with a stolen line, some paint chips, and that alive poem draft idea, I wrote this draft.

A Draft

Poems are alive
lapping at the sandy shore*
of my notebook.
Splashing in the waves
of hot sauce
sprinkled on my furious fingers.

Out of quarry depths
a draft
spotlights
on
something
worth
waiting
for.

–Margaret Simon (draft) 2019

*line from Christie Wyman

 

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#NPM19 Day 17 Green

Posted in Poetry, tagged , , on April 17, 2019| 10 Comments »

 

My friend Dani Burtsfield teaches kindergarten in Montana. She asked me how she could use the paint chips with her little ones.  I suggested a color poem.  The idea is simple.  Each line begins with the color name.  This is a way for young students to learn about metaphor in a concrete way.  I wrote a poem for her to use as a model for her students.  The pattern is Green is ______ followed by an action.

 

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#NPM19 Day 15 Playtime Again

Posted in Poetry, tagged , , , on April 15, 2019| 5 Comments »

I lost trust in the process of this poetry playtime.  So today I set out to make it work again.  I read Elisabeth Ellington’s post using metaphor dice in a different way.  She set up her rule of play: “I had to use one of each color (concept, adjective, object), and the dice I used had to touch each other. ” I looked at her picture of her box.

I decided to take mirror, silent, and teacher, but use mirror as the object rather than teacher and wrote “The mirror is my silent teacher.”  With the use of a few paint chips, the words flowed again.  I need to be more open to the process of creativity.  It does work on occasion.

The mirror is my silent noisy teacher

babbling on

about this line

and that

showing off

dark spots

and yet

reminding me

that grandma loved

hydrangeas.

She tended her garden

like I tend my face.

Time teaches me

spirit rock lessons–

some hard as stone

some soft as hearth. home

— Margaret Simon, (draft) 2019

I did some editing on this, but now I realize that babbling is not silent.  Perhaps I need to change silent to noisy? And then hearth is really hard, not soft, so maybe home works better.  I wonder how true to the words I am given do I need to be.  Word choice is a challenge set forth by every poem.  What do you think?

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