Poetry | Reflections on the Teche

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#NPM19 Day 24 Monarch Ecloses

Posted in Poetry, tagged Matt Forrest Esenwine, monarch, sedoka 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 Earth Day, haiku, nature 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 Acadiana Center for the Arts, ekphrastic poetry, Marla Kristicevich 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 Eudora Welty 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 #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, Christie Wyman, Paint Chip Poetry 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 #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, color poem 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 #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, metaphor dice, Paint Chip Poetry 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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#NPM19 Day 14 One Writer Recommends

Posted in Poetry, tagged advice for writers, Molly Dektar, Poets and Writers on April 14, 2019| 4 Comments »

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’ve somewhat abandoned the idea of playing with poetry. I’ve had my internal excuses, but in reality, I just don’t do well with a prescribed plan. To me, it doesn’t make me more creative; it gets in the way. I am still writing at least one poem a day. I’m just not using the tools in the playful kits.

Yesterday, I was reading Poets and Writers The Time is Now and became inspired by a feature called Writers Recommend. Molly Dektar’s advice this week was unique. This got me thinking about how every expert writer has his or her own advice to writers. I read writerly advice nearly every day. And feeling like I was abandoning my own project of “Playing with Poetry,” I wrote this poem.

One writer recommends
a thousand words a day,
another says to sit in words
for 2 hours at dawn.

Try writing while you’re falling asleep.
Let the pen run over the paper
making foreign marks
you will interpret later.

Maybe you should drink
two glasses of wine before writing.
Slur words together in a string
and drink them with a straw.

Molly likes to go to Sephora
and spray on all the different perfumes.
She writes with a tiny perfume bottle
while all her senses are aroused.

It really doesn’t matter.

Words will come.
Words will go.
Writers know this.
Writers count on it.

—Margaret Simon, 2019

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#NPM19 Day 13 Collaborative Poem Play

Posted in Poetry, Teaching, tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, Poetry with students on April 13, 2019| 4 Comments »

Playing with poetry has led to a playful poetry attitude in my class. My first class is reading poems aloud on the intercom for morning announcements from Great Morning: Poems for School Leaders to Read Aloud by Pomelo Books. Each day they pass it to the next-up. He or she chooses a poem they want to read and go through a quick practice to make sure they know how to pronounce all the words (especially the author’s name). I am pretty much hands off. They remember whose turn it is, come by the room to get the book, and just do it. Their read aloud skills are improving as well as their confidence. They are also learning that poetry can be fun to read aloud.

In the spirit of playing with poetry, I pulled out the individual white boards and proposed a game of collaborative poetry. They quickly changed the title to “Friends Poems.” Each friend wrote a line in the poem as we passed the boards around. The originator of the first line got the poem back and could add to it if they felt it needed more. This was fun and playful and built a sense of a writing community.

This one was written by Karson, Daniel, Breighlynn, and Jaden

I love the color of the midnight sky
shining stars
dawn and dusk compete
to meet eye to eye
the night is complete

I played along with my second group. We’ve watching monarch caterpillars in the garden. One day we counted 11 caterpillars. I’ve brought some home for spring break, but I’ll share more about this later. Here’s my collaborative poem with Kaia, Landon, and Jayden.

In the spring-sprinkled garden,
Listen as the bird tweets.
Watch the water run and flowers sway.
Look closely at monarch caterpillars.
Praise this amazing day!