I signed up to do an exchange for Spark Art #50 with my friend Inkling Linda Mitchell. Linda creates wonderful collages, so I asked her to do the exchange with me. She sent me a collage and I sent her a poem. She was charged with creating a collage from my poem and me with creating a poem from her collage. Fun, right? It is fun when you are playing with a friend you know will be respectful of your work and who does good work herself.
The links to our exchange on the Spark website are here and here.
I am sharing my poem process that responded to this collage.
The first thing I noticed was the moon. I wrote the title first, “Moonlight Sonata” and played Beethovan’s Sonata for inspiration. I noticed the foreign words. I asked Linda about the flowers, but she didn’t know what they were. I decided they were edelweiss. I got stuck, though, and decided to use a poem I had written for Laura Shovan’s February project and combine it with the work I was doing on responding to the collage. I don’t usually do this, and it created a level of mystery to the poem. And I’m OK with that.
Moonlight Sonata
Moon, wild orb nightly shining
high above the oak trees.
Your pull breaks waves
and concrete where oak roots
rise like bread, yeast pressing
our foreign earth.
How can you feel sadness
if you’ve not known joy?
When the edelweiss blooms,
we breathe in sweet scent,
welcome Spring
and sing praise for your goodness, Moon.
We push on and on
until, like you, the flower, the oak
we find our light
and shine.
© Margaret Simon
There are only a few dates left for the Kidlit Progressive poem. Claim your day here.
Reflections on the Teche 