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!
If you need a boost of confidence for your writing life, tune in to Irene Latham. She has started a Tuesday series on YouTube called “2-Minute Writing Tip Tuesday”. On her website, she has a quiz “What Kind of Writer Are You?” Take a minute to take the test for yourself. I did it twice and both times…
You’re the leader of a wolf pack! You’ve got lots of great ideas and love sharing them with others. You’re a great starter AND a great teacher. It’s your readers who motivate you—and they love you for it!
If you’re a Wolf, then you can stop trying to write highly personal essays that don’t feel natural to you. That’s not your strong suit. Write the fun thing, the thing you know your audience will love! You can stretch yourself by taking time away from your community for rest and reflection. Give yourself an opportunity to develop new ideas before jumping into the next new, exciting thing. Go ahead, give the world something to howl about!
Who doesn’t love a wolf writer! My favorite part of this is “You’re a great starter AND a great teacher!” I know it’s silly to be so excited to find out I am who I want to be. In fact, my One Little Word this year is Enough. I somehow knew it was time to stop questioning myself, my authenticity, my ability to connect people through writing. But it’s kinda fun to take these silly quizzes and find affirmation.
What kind of writer are you? What kind of writer do you want to be?
I participated in a few of the prompts in Ethical ELA Open Write this week. I wrote this poem using paint chip colors. (guacamole, candlelit beige, vining ivy, ancient copper)
Some Days it’s Enough to Wake Up
Finding my fingers dipped– green like guacamole– in the soil of my life.
You place a candle on the table, a small flicker of light blessing the moment, like vining ivy on a brick wall tangles in on itself but never falls.
We are becoming ancient copper, stained hands that have worked too long in this soil.
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.
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?
This weekend in New Iberia was the third annual Books along the Teche Literary Festival. On Friday, I attended a reading by former state poet laureate and one of my mentors, Darrell Bourque. He brought along accordion artist Mary Ardoin Broussard.
Mary Broussard plays the old Creole style of Zydeco music known as La La music. Darrell’s poems from his book Where I Waited (Yellow Flag Press, 2016) are written in the voices of early Cajun and Creole musicians from the 1930’s and 40’s. Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana spoke French. I don’t speak French, so sometimes I have a hard time following along. I love this music for its dancing beat, but I can’t sing the lyrics and rarely know what they mean.
Darrell wrote about the song Quoi Faire in his poem for Golden Thibodeaux with the title “Here and Here.” Mary said quoi faire means “Why you broke my heart like that?”
Darrell then spoke of the energy in Golden Thibodeaux’s music. I, however, listened to the energy between Darrell and Mary, making their own kind of music by echoing and honoring the voices of the past.
I played in a different way with my own poetry finding new lines within the lines of Darrell’s poem Here and Here.
Today I have two drafts written with a roll of metaphor dice. I tend to roll them until I get something I think I can write about. “Truth is a glorified meadow” was a first roll and it stumped me. Before re-rolling, I asked my student Landon what he thought it meant. He said, “It’s like when you have the truth, you have a wide open field of possibility.” Such wisdom in a young 5th grader.
I also challenged myself to use the zeno form: syllable count 8,4,2,1,4,2,1,4,2,1 with each 1 syllable rhyming.
Truth is a glorified meadow finding you in a clear field open playground without shield your forgiving spirit healed –Margaret Simon (draft) 2019
For the next metaphor dice poem, I used magnetic poetry words to help guide the results.
Hope is a glorified dance to delicate music– a gorgeous goddess whispering near, misty gift here. –Margaret Simon (draft) 2019
Thursday was a stormy day. Everyone was talking about the storm, so when we were looking for a topic for a zeno poem, Thunder came through.
A zeno poem was invented by J. Patrick Lewis and it follows the mathematical sequence 8,4,2,1,4,2,1,4,2,1, and the one syllable words rhyme. Great time to pull up RhymeZone and do some chatting about word meanings like dire.
Thunder is a loud, cranky noise terrifying crackling fire electric charges targets wire outrageously shocking dire.
–Mrs. Simon’s class
I then set my students loose to write their own zeno poems while I worked on my own. I tried the haikubes, but there are no rhyming words in them, so it proved nearly impossible to make a zeno. Then I turned to metaphor dice. A little better, but I’m still not completely satisfied with the results. But, as writing partner Molly Hogan stated in her post yesterday, I honored the play of it all.
The mind is a back-handed drum pounding fissures into line beating thoughts with rhythm time waiting for my soul to shine.
See more posts at Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life
Some of you have been following our wood duck house story. In late February, my husband built a wood duck house and set it up near the bayou. We put a Ring doorbell camera inside to capture the whole process. We were amazed when a hen came in the very next day. It took her a few weeks to lay the eggs and begin sitting on them. I wrote about it here and here.
The last time I was able to count the eggs, I had counted 13 eggs.
The problem with using a Ring camera is, with the constant motion of a hen sitting fairly consistently, the battery runs down. We changed it out once with no problem, but Saturday afternoon, it had totally died. Because we couldn’t look at the camera to see if the hen was in the house, my husband spooked her when he went to change the battery.
She came back for a brief minute then flew back out at around 7:30 PM. After that, nothing.
Did she abandon the nest altogether? Alerts to motion come onto my phone. I usually turn off notifications during the night but I didn’t Saturday. We waited for the buzz of the phone. Nothing.
Sunday morning I looked out the window, saying a few prayers that she would return. I saw the couple in the water. I practically begged at the window, “Please go back in. Please go back in.”
She flew up and around the house and landed back in the water.
I woke up my husband who admits he wasn’t really sleeping. I said, “There must be some kind of sound coming from the camera to scare her like that.”
He said, “To hell with broadcasting, we need to save these eggs.”
But taking the camera out didn’t prove necessary. I heard a buzz on my phone. She’s back! She was in the box, settling in, poking around, as if nothing had happened. Whew! Relief!
Relieved to get this phone alert.
Jeff watched one of the videos from the camera and noticed that there was a hen perched at the hole flying out while another hen was in the box sitting. Could they both be sitting? Are they sharing the nest?
While our hen was away, I was able to get a shot of the eggs. She hadn’t had time to cover them before she left. I counted 20 eggs! Twenty!
If my calculations are right, and the 12 hour hiatus doesn’t change the incubation time, the eggs are due to hatch on or around April 11th. You know I will be posting. You can follow on my Instagram or Facebook page.
Now for poetry. I am playing with some fun poetry games. My students are playing along and posting on our Kidblog site.
With Paint Chip Poetry, I pulled honey, quicksilver, and under the sea. The prompt was “We’re all in this together.”
We’re all wild honey under the sea free and quick like silver sparkles together making waves splashing sprays whale family.
My box of Paint Chip Poetry arrived just in time for this month’s poetry writing. I am playing with poetry. In Paint Chip Poetry, you select a prompt which is a phrase, along with some paint chips. The paint colors have names. I’m not sure if I’m playing right, but here is what I got.
A little revision:
Far, far away before the rain, a sunburst glows on scarecrow makes him believe in magic like gold at the end of the rainbow. –Margaret Simon, (draft) 2019
Matt Forrest Esenwine has the first line for the Progressive Poem. He is using found lines. The schedule is in the sidebar. National Poetry Month begins!
Margaret Simon lives on the Bayou Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana. She is a retired elementary gifted teacher who writes poetry and children's books. Welcome to a space of peace, poetry, and personal reflection. Walk in kindness.
National Poetry Month 2019: I am playing with poetry alongside 
Reflections on the Teche 