Poetry Friday is with Katie at The Logonauts.
I hate snakes! I always have for as long as I can remember. I grew up running around the piney woods of Mississippi and now I live on a bayou in Louisiana. Snakes are a part of my world, but they terrify me.
This week one of the news stories that we poets responded to was about a snake coming out of a toilet in Texas. If you want to never look at a toilet the same way again, read this article. I decided against posting a picture on my blog. It was bad enough that I had to see it repeatedly on my Facebook feed.
The day this prompt was posted for Laura Shovan’s February ten found words writing project I was teaching cinquains to my students. They were writing them about their names. I chose to write about this snake menace. I enjoyed sharing the frightful article and resulting poem with them.
The rules for a cinquain are 5 lines with 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables in each line.
rattle
in the toilet
camouflaged cryptic sign
surprising an innocent boy
Nightmare!shovel
slamming down hard
killing snake in a clump
unknowing den of twenty three
silentcellar
perfect hiding
for slithering secrets
wondering when their diamonds
will shine–Margaret Simon, all rights reserved
Reflections on the Teche 