Reflections on the Teche

#NPM19 Day 26 What the Heart Knows

April 26, 2019 by margaretsmn

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

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Teaching, Writing | Tagged chant poems, Joyce Sidman, What the Heart Knows | 9 Comments »

#NPM19 Day 25 Ode to a Gel Pen

April 25, 2019 by margaretsmn

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.

Posted in Poetry, Writing | Tagged #NPM19, #playwithpoetrynpm, skinny odes | 1 Comment »

#NPM19 Day 24 Monarch Ecloses

April 24, 2019 by margaretsmn

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

Posted in Poetry | Tagged Matt Forrest Esenwine, monarch, sedoka | 1 Comment »

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.