Reflections on the Teche

Slice of Life: Cruelty of Nature

April 23, 2019 by margaretsmn

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

Posted in Poetry, Slice of Life | 11 Comments »

NPM19 Day 22 Earth Day

April 22, 2019 by margaretsmn

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.

Posted in Poetry, Writing | Tagged Earth Day, haiku, nature | 2 Comments »

#NPM19 Day 20 Nest

April 20, 2019 by margaretsmn

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

Posted in Poetry | Tagged Acadiana Center for the Arts, ekphrastic poetry, Marla Kristicevich | 4 Comments »

#NPM19 Day 19 Eudora’s Garden

April 19, 2019 by margaretsmn

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.

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday | Tagged Eudora Welty | 18 Comments »

#NPM19 Day 18 Draft

April 18, 2019 by margaretsmn

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

Posted in Poetry | Tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, Christie Wyman, Paint Chip Poetry | 7 Comments »

#NPM19 Day 17 Green

April 17, 2019 by margaretsmn

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.

Posted in Poetry | Tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, color poem | 10 Comments »

Slice of Life: Monarchs

April 16, 2019 by margaretsmn

See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life

My fifth grade students were testing, and since my classroom is a computer lab, I was left with no place to teach my third grader. What does a teacher do when it’s a beautiful spring day and there is no space in the school? Go outside. Kaia and I went to the garden. I had with me paint chips and the book Because of Winn Dixie, so we wrote poems and read aloud. When we took a break and walked around the garden, we discovered a patch of milkweed and counted four monarch caterpillars.

The next day we were offered the French classroom, but we made some time to go out and check the garden. Our count went up to eleven.

On Thursday when we went outside, there was a garden group who comes once a month to tend to the garden, teach 4H students and hold garden club after school. Today there was a naturalist who was speaking on monarch butterflies. She taught us a few things. One thing, do not trust your count because there are always more than you can see.

She showed Kaia how to touch a caterpillar. They do not sting or harm you, but you could harm their delicate feet. Kaia spotted some crawling all the way over on the concrete slab away from the garden. She rushed over to tell the naturalist about this. She explained to us that monarch caterpillars travel away from the host plant when they are ready to pupate. She gently picked these two up and carried them back to the garden area.

I decided to come back after school and gather a few caterpillars to take home. Meadow (yes, the naturalist’s name is Meadow) gave me instructions on how to care for them. It’s a good thing she did. I thought I had only brought home four caterpillars fat and ready for pupation, but as the days went on, there appeared 3 more in the net habitat.

The four made chrysalises on the plastic top of the container, but I’ve had to feed the three that appeared. I’ve been gathering (stealing) milkweed from our church school’s garden to keep them fed. I hope I haven’t brought home even more caterpillars unknowing. So far, so good. I’ll post updates on my Instagram and Facebook pages.

The science of nature fascinates me. I think I’d like to be a naturalist like Meadow when I grow up.

Posted in Slice of Life, Writing | Tagged monarch caterpillars | 9 Comments »

#NPM19 Day 15 Playtime Again

April 15, 2019 by margaretsmn

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?

Posted in Poetry | Tagged #NPM19, #PlayingwithpoetryNPM, metaphor dice, Paint Chip Poetry | 5 Comments »

#NPM19 Day 14 One Writer Recommends

April 14, 2019 by margaretsmn

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

Posted in Poetry | Tagged advice for writers, Molly Dektar, Poets and Writers | 4 Comments »

#NPM19 Day 13 Collaborative Poem Play

April 13, 2019 by margaretsmn

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!