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Archive for the ‘Poetry Friday’ Category

Poetry Friday is being gathered today by Mona Voelkel.

Last week I attended an artist roundup at the Acadiana Center for the Arts. It was a free event for any artist in the community. This roundup was centered around still life drawing. In the large gathering room, there were supplies and circles of chairs around a variety of still life models/set-ups. I chose to sit between two friends, so I could feel safe among so many different artists. I walked around the room to see what others had done, but the intent was an open space for creatives to meet and talk and practice, not to compare yourself to others.

I’ve been dabbling in watercolor. I was pleased with the vase of flowers, so I cut it out of the whole painting. I decided to use this experience to write a haiku sonnet with the Poetry Sisters.

Still Life by Margaret Simon

Each artist sees
with different eye-angles,
not one best view.

She paints in color
while another scratches
pastels or charcoal.

No ring leaders here.
A circle of practicing,
finding our flow.

I choose the vase
of dead flowers leaning,
colors faded depth.

Judgement left outside the door
open easy to joy-play.

Margaret Simon, draft

I encourage you to go to the Poetry Friday roundup to see how other poets wrote haiku sonnets. It’s a fun form to use.

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Poetry Friday is being hosted this week by Denise at Dare to Care.

At our Inklings retreat earlier this month, Heidi pulled out the paint chip poetry box. This is always a fun writing activity. How many chips do you select? Do you go with the prompt card?

We had returned from a busy day at Planet Word in D.C.. I highly recommend a trip there if you are ever in the area. The museum is a mastery of interactive activities with language as the focus from multilingual speakers on a screen to karaoke. Molly and I laughed out loud at the joke station.

Sculpture outside Planet Word museum

When I picked my wild assortment of color cards, I drafted a fun imaginative poem that tickled me.

Once Upon a Time in WhisperShout Studio

(a potpourri poem)

Here on Spirit Rock, near Silver Springs 

beyond Wax Waterfall, 

the acorn of my heart 

opens like a lotus blossom 

(a spotlight to what’s hidden.)

I wax-seal this day into my journal 

full of cumulonimbus clouds of words

holding 

my hot saucy breath

ready for fresh air. 

Margaret Simon, draft

Tree of language at Planet Word

I am posting my weekly photo prompt on Substack. Here’s a link if you want to check out this week’s photo and poem. Subscribe if you want to get a notification each week. Thanks!

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Poetry Friday is hosted today by my dear Inkling friend in Maine, Molly Hogan at Nix the Comfort Zone.

This week I celebrated my 65th birthday with my family on Tuesday in New Orleans. I have been babysitting my youngest grandchildren, June (3.5 years) and Sam (13 months) while my daughter and son-in-law work. The kids are adorable and exhausting, entertaining and a physical work-out, especially Sam who is climbing and into everything.

My favorite moments include nightly story time. June squeezes in next to me on the glider. Sam loves holding the book and babbling like he is reading along.

Yesterday while June napped, I took Sammy out in the stroller. He is happy being outside, even in mid-90 temperatures.

Notes on a Walk along Paris Avenue, New Orleans.

As the stroller passes, a squirrel leaps
to the next oak, blue reflections in its tail
as if the sky was caught there, unaware.

The baby hums along with the breeze,
a song dancing in his head.

Echoes from the neighborhood school garden:
”Clap, Clap, Clap! Listen!”

A Little Free Library opens
at the hummingbird house.

Bright pink Crepe Myrtle blossoms
canopy overhead, the only flower that blooms
in this heat.

My heart rate matches time with sidewalk bumps. Baby babbling softens as he sleeps.

Margaret Simon, draft

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Poetry Friday is gathered today by Tabatha Yeatts.

I am in a comfortable space on Heidi Mordhorst’s front porch for our long awaited Inklings retreat. We’ve been meeting on Zoom as a writing group for around 10 years and this is the first time we’ve been together in person. Heidi’s front porch welcomes the morning sun and is a perfect place to sit with coffee and type a PF post.

I don’t always participate in the Poetry Sisters’ challenge; however, this month’s prompt is a favorite of mine, Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Pantoum.

July Sings, Sizzles

Cicada song sizzles with rising heat.
My neck sweats, wet like a glass of iced tea. 
I feel my body slowing down.
Even the birds stop singing by ten.

My neck’s wet like a glass sweats.
Shade just an illusion of cool.
Even the birds stop singing by ten.
Yet, today I release another butterfly.

Shade, an illusion of cool, waits 
for grief like the great blue heron he drew.
So today I release another butterfly.
I had a dream he returned like the sun.

Grief is the great blue heron he watched.
I feel my own body slowing down.
I had a dream he returned as my son.
Cicada song rising with the heat. 

Heron in Flight by John Gibson

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Poetry Friday is being hosted by Jill. She offers an instructional video on making zines.

A few months ago I joined a poetry postcard exchange group. I’ve received creative handmade postcards and poems from people I’ve never met. It is so much fun to find one tucked into my mailbox, a bit of sunshine on a cloudy day. I need to figure out a way to keep them so that I can enjoy both sides. Any ideas?

Poetry Postcards

This month I sent out a photo card I made on Canva using a photo of passion flower.

The poet
finds a prayer
on the passion vine
resting on yellow anther
sprinkling pollen
on bumblebees.

The hope is in the bee’s
instinct to stick around.
Margaret Simon


I’m also participating in the Summer Poem Swap that Tabatha organizes. I received a Little Golden Book handmade book from Linda Mitchell. I love that she kept all the pages from the original book.

Little Golden Book journal made by Linda Mitchell.

I’m using it to do collage journaling about my summer. Here is a page spread I made about birds. The watercolor goldfinch is from an Emily Lex Studio watercolor painting book.

In what ways are you embracing poetry and creativity this summer?

I want to thank Joyce Uglow for featuring me and my book “What’s That Sound? Birds of the Bayou” on her uGroNews series this week.

I have moved “This Photo Wants to be a Poem” to my Substack. Please consider subscribing so that it will show up in your inbox.

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Poetry Friday roundup is with Jan at Bookseed Studio.

I can always count on Georgia Heard for getting me through a writing slump. She sends out a monthly prompt calendar. Each prompt is easily accessible from where I sit at my kitchen table. The prompt for July 8th was “Describe a place by what’s missing from it.”

My gaze went directly to the window to the dead satsuma tree outside. We lost it in the big freeze of 2025. I’ve asked my yard man (my husband) to let it be. I was hoping to attract downy woodpeckers. In the spring passion vine sprang up around the trunk of the tree. As I had hoped, the space has become alive with bees and butterflies and birds.

Dead Tree is Alive

With passion vine
open purple flowers
for fritillary lighting.
A suet feeder invaded
by raccoon fingers
lies open and empty.
Old satsuma leafless
sweet fruit a memory.
Lichen clings, fluffs in misty rain.

You are holding hope
of feathers
on bare branches,
Alive.

Margaret Simon, draft

Dead Satsuma Tree on Bayou Teche, LA.

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The Poetry Friday Roundup today is at Michelle’s place: More Art 4 All

Today is the first Friday of the month, so we have an Inklings Challenge. Catherine asked us to use a prompt from Audrey Gidman’s June list:

“Read “Digging” by Seamus Heaney. Think about something that has been handed down to you—from a parent, a grandparent, an elder in your life—that feels alive in you now. Think of how it is the same and think of how it has transformed in you. Notice how, for Heaney, it’s gardening and writing—two kinds of digging, but still the digging continues through the generations. Write a poem that digs into what was handed down to you and examines what you carry now.”

This summer I have been doing a good deal of babysitting for my grandchildren. This has been both a privilege and a challenge. I have a lullaby that was passed down to me that I sang to my children and continue to sing to my grandchildren (even to Leo who cringes every time).

Singing

Inspired by Seamus Heaney

My grandson asks for a lullaby 
while he covers his head, hiding 
beneath the blankets.

When my mother sang an operatic alto,
in a foreign language she’d never spoken,
I hid from her joy, let her vibrato shiver 
my heart under a pillow.

I didn’t want to know opera 
like her father taught her, 
but she took me anyway, 
read the plot before curtain call.

I made my body small
in the plush red theatre seat. 

Now, I see her face in mine.
My voice cracks on the high notes.
My smile wrinkles into soft blush.
Singing was the last thing to go.   

Here, I sit perched on the edge of the bed
leaning into a seven year old boy
claiming his independence
while wishing
for a song to cling to. 

Margaret Simon, draft

Check out other Inklings poems below:

Catherine @Reading to the Core
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Linda @A Word Edgewise
Mary Lee @Another Year of Reading
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone

Free photo

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Poetry Friday Roundup is with Tricia today at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

A Walk to Port Townsend

I hear
chirps of Pine Siskin hiding in the bushes,
watch seeds of cottonwood
fly like moths on fluffy wings—

Hold
the view of Pacific waters chanting
over wishing stones, calling me
to inhale.

Open
a door
to a free poem-of-the-day—
Here is Pádraig’s “Our Lady of the Garden”.

Thank you, universe, for all this time with you.

Poem found in a poetry box in Port Townsend, Washington.
Illustration by Leo, age 7

This Mamére has been busy this summer. In early June, we took a trip with two of our three daughters and their families to the Pacific Northwest. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and cool. I found poetry everywhere, on trails, in town squares, and in poetry boxes.

This week I was in charge of Leo, my oldest grandson who is seven. Seven changes everything! He can read and write and walk 2 miles in the heat. We took a long walk to our local city park. He humored me by helping me write a poem about our walk. He illustrated. You can see a video of him reading the poem on my Substack.

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Poetry Friday is being gathered today by Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise.
Our view of the Elwha River and Olympic Mountains, Port Angeles, Washington

When we first arrived in the Pacific Northwest and awoke to an amazing view of the Olympic Mountains from the AirBnB, I thought I would write poetry every day on our trip. That didn’t happen as we got busier with the family, day hikes, town shopping, river rock throwing (children love a good game of throwing rocks). However on that early June morning, I opened Audrey Gidman’s prompts and wrote a poem using a flower as the title, inspired by James Wright’s Milkweed. For the most part, I wanted to capture the essence of place in the amazing peaceful scene of the Olympic Mountains.

Lupine

While I looked beyond the window
lost in blue-green of Crescent Lake,
I sat in longing.
Tall Douglas fir scented the air
of Christmases long ago.

I look up now.
The view is changed.
What was color
is a wild warmth
seeking my sincerity—
a vision of bright red strawberries
sweeter than the sun.

Margaret Simon, draft

Free image, lupine

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Mary Lee has the roundup today as well as a sign up for Poetry Friday hosts at A(nother) Year of Reading.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a master at the Pantoum poetry form. In his newsletter last week, he offered sentence stems and a 1-8 line prompt. He suggested “Don’t stress over it: bring yourself generously to yourself.” The whole prompt can be found here. If you haven’t tried a Pantoum before, you should give it a try. This time I was pleased enough with the results to share my poem with you.

Time

Today, my mind wants peace
and I watch the white cat;
although yesterday I sang of grace.
As I write, I cling to memory

and watch the white cat.
When I was younger, I thought tears were weak.
As I write and cling to memory,
I couldn’t have known, terrible things would happen.

When I was younger and thought tears were weak,
I wish I’d known grief is a bitch.
I couldn’t have known how terrible things happen.
I had a dream I was a cloud.

Grief is a bitch anyway;
although yesterday I sang of grace.
I dream of clouds.
Today my mind offers peace. 

Margaret Simon, draft

Releasing a Gulf Fritillary butterfly
May, 2026

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