And it's a poem!

Here's the completed poem, along with an illustration.  For the fourth time, thirty writers have worked together to make a Progressive Poem for National Poetry Month.  Click over to read Donna's line, or look below to see the whole text. 

Thanks to all the participants (listed below).  It's been fun!  Same time next year?


April

1 Laura at Writing the World for Kids

2 Joy at Joy Acey

3 Doraine at Dori Reads

4 Diane at Random Noodling

5 Penny at A Penny and Her Jots

6 Carol at Beyond LiteracyLink

7 Liz at Elizabeth Steinglass

8 Janet F. at Live Your Poem

9 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche

10 Pat at Writer on a Horse

11 Buffy at Buffy's Blog

12 Michelle at Today's Little Ditty

13 Linda at TeacherDance

14 Jone at Deo Writer

15 Matt at Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

16 Violet at Violet Nesdoly

17 Kim at Flukeprints

18 Irene at Live Your Poem

19 Charles at Poetry Time

20 Ruth at There is No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town

21 Jan at Bookseedstudio

22 Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge

23 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page

24 Amy at The Poem Farm

25 Mark at Jackett Writes

26 Renee at No Water River

27 Mary Lee at Poetrepository

28 Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe

29 Sheila at Sheila Renfro

30 Donna at Mainely Write



Thoughts Take Flight

A squall of hawk wings stirs the sky.
A hummingbird holds and then hies.
     “If I could fly, I’d choose to be
      Sailing through a forest of poet-trees.”
A cast of crabs engraves the sand
Delighting a child’s outstretched hand.
     "If I could breathe under the sea,
      I’d dive, I’d dip, I’d dance with glee."
A clump of crocuses craves the sun.
Kites soar while joyful dogs run.
     "I sing to spring, to budding green,
     to all of life – seen and unseen."
Wee whispers drift from cloud to ear
and finally reach one divining seer
who looks up from her perch and beams —
     "West Wind is dreaming May, it seems."
Golden wings open and gleam
as I greet the prancing team.
     "Gliding aside with lyrical speed,
     I'd ride Pegasus to Ganymede."
To a pied pocket, the zephyr returns.
Blowing soft words the seer discerns
     "from earthbound voyage to dreamy night,
     The time is now.  I give you flight!"
Yet I fear I am no kite or bird –
I lift!  The world below me blurred
by tears of joy.  I spiral high,
     "I hum, I dive, I dip, I hive!"
     "Behold, Spring is but a dance away!"
I grasp my pen, then capture this day.

 

Line Twenty-Nine

Almost finished!

Line Twenty-Eight

It's here.  And there's a title now, too!

Line Twenty-Seven

Mary Lee wrote the next line!

Line Twenty-Six

The poem continues.

Line Twenty-Five

Here it is.

Line Twenty-Four

Amy has it here.

Happy birthday to me!

Ten years ago today, I started blogging.  When I look back at all that's happened in my life since then, it feels as though I am not even the same person who first worked on figuring out the intricacies of Blogger and felt proud to know how to add a hyperlink.  I am thankful for the way this blog has helped me express ideas and make new friends.  Shakespeare wrote that his love would not die, because he had immortalized her in his words.  I have no such illusions about how long any words of mine will continue to be read, but I am glad to have preserved thoughts at least for longer than the moment when they flashed across my mind.  I often go back and check on what I was reading and thinking at a given point in the past, and if I have any other readers (and sometimes I do), that's a bonus.  Thanks for reading, if you're here.  High five and happy birthday to me.

Line Twenty-Three

Here's today's line.

Poetry Friday - Dennis Craig

I have been reading nature poems with my eighth graders in preparation for Earth Day.  I don't remember where I found this poem, but I used it with my students for a few years before I realized that the poet, Dennis Craig, was from the Caribbean (Guyana).  I love this poem because it's about nature in the city, and I can imagine that many young people growing up in the city where I live (Port-au-Prince, Haiti), have a similar experience.

This is a Petrarchan sonnet.  I love the juxtaposition of that highly academic, fancy form with the stark reality of the life described in the poem: the persona of the poem lives in a nasty urban environment.  His first exposure to flowers comes when someone puts in a park.

Flowers

Dennis Craig

I have never learnt the names of flowers.

From beginning, my world has been a place

Of pot-holed streets where thick, sluggish gutters race

In slow time, away from garbage heaps and sewers

Past blanched old houses around which cowers

Stagnant earth.  There, scarce green thing grew to chase

The dull-gray squalor of sick dust; no trace

Of plant save few sparse weeds; just these, no flowers.

One day, they cleared a space and made a park

There in the city’s slums; and suddenly

Came stark glory like lightning in the dark,

While perfume and bright petals thundered slowly.

I learnt no names, but hue, shape and scent mark

My mind, even now, with symbols holy.

There is so much here: the way nature relates to the spiritual, the way exposing a young person to beauty can change everything, the lightning and thunder of new thoughts, a new way of seeing the world.

I live in an urban environment, too, and one of the things I love most is getting weekly flower deliveries from a merchant in my neighborhood.  When I shared this poem with my eighth graders, I told them that the flowers in the poem were "almost holy."   Then I looked back at the poem and saw that Craig hadn't qualified "holy" the way I had.  There was no "almost" about it.  For him, the flowers were "symbols holy."  And for me they are, too.  They remind me that there is still beauty even in the midst of difficulty, that riotous color still exists in spite of everything.  They remind me to "consider the lilies," which Emily Dickinson wrote was the only commandment she always obeyed.  Here is a recent bouquet from my "flower guy."

Here's an article I found about Dennis Craig and this poem.  I posted this poem once before, in 2012.

Here's something I wrote about flowers  when I was in the States after the earthquake.

And here's today's roundup, hosted by the incomparable Jama.

Line Twenty-Two

Robin has the twenty-second line here.

Line Twenty-One

Line twenty-one is here.

Progressive Poem is Here Today

I have struggled all day with my line.  I don't have a clear mental image of what's going on here.  We have some birds.  We have a beach scene.  We have a springtime riot of crocuses and kites and green.  We have the whispering wind.  And then we have some...horses?  Winged horses?  Hippogriffs?  I'm not really sure, and I don't know who is greeting them - that is, I can't picture the person in my mind.  Most serious of all for my line, I don't know who is gliding aside - is it the horse-like creatures or the narrator?  I do know that the narrator longs to fly, to dive, to run with dogs - she (I think it's a she) would definitely grab the opportunity to ride these winged creatures, if she could.  Then there's still that divining seer on her perch from the previous stanza.  Who or what is that?  Since the seer is on a perch, I thought maybe it was a bird, and maybe the golden wings belong to that bird.  More and more, I'm thinking that the persona of the poem is immobilized somehow, watching birds and a beach and a nearby park where children fly kites, imagining but not able to get up and go.  Is it an elderly person?  Someone who is ill or disabled?  She's dreaming, she's thinking of life, "seen and unseen."  So many things still to figure out in the last ten lines.  And meanwhile, I have to write something...

I decided to give our persona another wish, keeping it in the unsatisfying "I'd" form instead of letting her act on her wish, keeping the action imaginary.  I hope Jan thinks I've made the right decision.

A squall of hawk wings stirs the sky.

A hummingbird holds and then hies.

If I could fly, I'd choose to be

Sailing through a forest of poet-trees.

A cast of crabs engraves the sand

Delighting a child's outstretched hand.

If I could breathe under the sea,

I'd dive, I'd dip, I'd dance with glee.

A clump of crocuses crave the sun.

Kites soar while joyful dogs run.

I sing to spring, to budding green,

to all of life - seen and unseen.

Wee whispers drift from cloud to ear

and finally reach one divining seer

who looks up from her perch and beams --

West Wind is dreaming May, it seems.

Golden wings open and gleam

as I greet the prancing team.

Gliding aside with lyrical speed,

I'd ride Pegasus to Ganymede.   

April

1 Laura at Writing the World for Kids

2 Joy at Joy Acey

3 Doraine at Dori Reads

4 Diane at Random Noodling

5 Penny at A Penny and Her Jots

6 Carol at Beyond LiteracyLink

7 Liz at Elizabeth Steinglass

8 Janet F. at Live Your Poem

9 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche

10 Pat at Writer on a Horse

11 Buffy at Buffy's Blog

12 Michelle at Today's Little Ditty

13 Linda at TeacherDance

14 Jone at Deo Writer

15 Matt at Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

16 Violet at Violet Nesdoly

17 Kim at Flukeprints

18 Irene at Live Your Poem

19 Charles at Poetry Time

20 Ruth at There is No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town

21 Jan at Bookseedstudio

22 Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge

23 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page

24 Amy at The Poem Farm

25 Mark at Jackett Writes

26 Renee at No Water River

27 Mary Lee at Poetrepository

28 Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe

29 Sheila at Sheila Renfro

30 Donna at Mainely Write

Lines Seventeen and Eighteen

I didn't post the Progressive Poem yesterday, but here are the next two lines.

Reading Update

Books #52 and 54 of this year were the second and third in the Selection series: The Elite and The One, by Kiera Cass.  I hated this series, and I'm really not sure why I kept reading it.  It's kind of like The Hunger Games series except without the killing, but the Selection is in its own way as barbaric.  All of these girls competing for the prince's affections, and struggling with deception and jealousy, made me anxious and miserable.  I hated the whiplash-inducing mood swings of the main character, America.  I'm not even sure why I was so drawn into these characters' dilemmas, since I didn't find any of the characters compelling or believable.  Thankfully these were library books, so I didn't spend any money on them.

Book #53 was Committed: A Love Story, by Elizabeth Gilbert.  This was the only book in this post that I liked.  Elizabeth Gilbert overanalyzes and overthinks as much as I do, which is saying a lot.  In this book she is trying to convince herself that it's OK for her to get married.  The guy she fell in love with at the end of Eat, Pray, Love gets arrested and deported (though she keeps saying that's not the official word for what happens to him), and the only solution is to regularize the paperwork and then immediately get married.  But both have sworn never to remarry after going through painful divorces, and they must come to terms with marriage as an institution.  Gilbert's boyfriend comes to terms with the idea in a few minutes, but Gilbert must fret endlessly for over three hundred pages.  My favorite parts of this book were the places where Gilbert talked to people of different cultures about their experiences with marriage.  Once again, I found her narrative voice to be fun and interesting, and even though I have been married since practically the moment I became an adult, I could very much relate to her compulsive need to research everything within an inch of its life.  It's exhausting to be us, eh, Liz?

Book #55 made me anxious for different reasons from the Selection series.  This book, The Objects of Her Affection, by Sonya Cobb, is about Sophie Porter, who gets in all kinds of trouble with her mortgage and with her pesky little habit of stealing objects from the museum where her husband works as a curator.  Oh Sophie, I kept thinking, please just tell the truth; this is not going to end well.  Ugh, stressful.

This is not a time in my life to be reading stressful books.  I'm having enough whiplash-inducing mood swings myself without reading about the ones other people are dealing with.  I decided to read Pride and Prejudice again (probably I'm heading into the double digits for the number of times I've read this book).  Even though there are plenty of mood swings in this book, plenty of misunderstandings, plenty of difficulties, I know that everything is going to work out.  Right now that feels very appealing to me.  This was the second book I read after the post-earthquake period when I couldn't read at all.  (The first was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.)  I found it soothing then (predictable and no earthquakes), and I hope it won't fail me this time.

This post is linked to the April 16th Saturday Review of Books. 

Line Sixteen

Here's the sixteenth line.

Poetry Friday: Lost

Lost
by David Wagoner

Stand still.  The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost.  Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.  Listen.  It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.  
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost.  Stand still.  The forest knows
Where you are.  You must let it find you.

I posted this poem once before in 2011.  "Wherever you are is called Here."  That is at once the most glaringly obvious truth, and the most difficult thing to keep in mind.  So often I am somewhere else instead of in the particular, irreplaceable, beautiful moment called Here (and Now).  I'm working on standing still.

I took this photo last week on our campus.  This bougainvillea is part of my Here, not a forest but a city, my Here where no two branches are the same.

Here's today's roundup.

Line Fifteen

Matt Forrest Esenwine wrote the fifteenth line. Halfway through!

April

1 Laura at Writing the World for Kids

2 Joy at Joy Acey

3 Doraine at Dori Reads

4 Diane at Random Noodling

5 Penny at A Penny and Her Jots

6 Carol at Beyond LiteracyLink

7 Liz at Elizabeth Steinglass

8 Janet F. at Live Your Poem

9 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche

10 Pat at Writer on a Horse

11 Buffy at Buffy's Blog

12 Michelle at Today's Little Ditty

13 Linda at TeacherDance

14 Jone at Deo Writer

15 Matt at Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

16 Violet at Violet Nesdoly

17 Kim at Flukeprints

18 Irene at Live Your Poem

19 Charles at Poetry Time

20 Ruth at There is No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town

21 Jan at Bookseedstudio

22 Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge

23 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page

24 Amy at The Poem Farm

25 Mark at Jackett Writes

26 Renee at No Water River

27 Mary Lee at Poetrepository

28 Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe

29 Sheila at Sheila Renfro

30 Donna at Mainely Write

Line Fourteen

Here's the next line!

Line Thirteen

Linda wrote the thirteenth line!

Line Twelve

Here's the twelfth line.

So Much Happiness

So Much Happiness, by Naomi Shihab Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records….. Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

 

Line Eleven

We're already up to the eleventh line!

Line Ten

Here's line ten.

Reading Update

Book #41 of 2016 was State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett.  I recently read Elizabeth Gilbert's book on creativity, Big Magic.  Gilbert and Patchett are good friends, and there are lots of references to Patchett's books in Gilbert's book, so I looked for them in the library.  This one is a novel about the Amazon, and it's wonderful and absorbing and satisfying.  Highly recommended.

Book #42 was Good Night, God: Night Time Devotions to End Your Day God's Way, by David C. Cook.  This was one I'd read a few pages of in the middle of the night if I couldn't sleep.  I haven't been sleeping very well, so I finished it the other night.

Book #43 was a YA verse novel about the 2011 Tohoku quake in Japan, Up from the Sea, by Leza Lowitz.  This book is an easy read, due to its format, but the subject matter is heavy.

Book #44 was A Well-Worn Path: Thirty-One Daily Reflections for the Worshipping Heart, by Dan Wilt.  I have actually read this quite a few times; it's designed to be reread every month.  I've just never listed it in my book total.

Book #45 was When God Breaks Your Heart: Choosing Hope in the Midst of Faith-Shattering Circumstances, by Ed Underwood.  Underwood shares his own experiences dealing with a debilitating illness.

Book #46 was another Patchett title, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of Patchett's short non-fiction.

Book #47 was Kwame Alexander's new book, Booked, and yes, I did download it and read it the day it came out.  I liked it a lot and will probably share it with my seventh graders, since it's about soccer.

Book #48 was Together Tea, by Marjan Kamali.  This is about a family of immigrants from Iran.  I love books about families of immigrants, wherever they are from, and as I had just recently watched the movie of Persepolis with my daughter, I was particularly interested in this story.

Book #49 was The Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life's Hard, by Kara Tippetts.  Tippetts was a blogger who died of cancer a year ago.  This book is heartbreaking but well worth reading.

Book #50 was The Selection, by Kiera Cass, a goofy YA title about a Bachelor-type wife-choosing competition by a prince in a bizarre dystopian future of the United States.  Silly, but I'm reading the second one now.

Book #51 was a reread, Trouble, by Gary D. Schmidt.  Actually I have read it many times, since I've been sharing it with my eighth graders for the last several years.  This time I read it aloud to my husband, who liked it as much as I do. Reading aloud is one of my very favorite things to do, and Schmidt's beautiful prose is a special delight. “The world is Trouble . . . and Grace. That is all there is,” says Henry, the protagonist, at the end of the book.  So true, and this book is one example of Grace.

This post is linked to today's Saturday Review of Books.

Line Nine

Here's line nine.

Line Eight

Here's the eighth line.

Progressive Poem Schedule

April

1 Laura at Writing the World for Kids

2 Joy at Joy Acey

3 Doraine at Dori Reads

4 Diane at Random Noodling

5 Penny at A Penny and Her Jots

6 Carol at Beyond LiteracyLink

7 Liz at Elizabeth Steinglass

8 Janet F. at Live Your Poem

9 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche

10 Pat at Writer on a Horse

11 Buffy at Buffy's Blog

12 Michelle at Today's Little Ditty

13 Linda at TeacherDance

14 Jone at Deo Writer

15 Matt at Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

16 Violet at Violet Nesdoly

17 Kim at Flukeprints

18 Irene at Live Your Poem

19 Charles at Poetry Time

20 Ruth at There is No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town

21 Jan at Bookseedstudio

22 Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge

23 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page

24 Amy at The Poem Farm

25 Mark at Jackett Writes

26 Renee at No Water River

27 Mary Lee at Poetrepository

28 Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe

29 Sheila at Sheila Renfro

30 Donna at Mainely Write

Line Seven

Here's the seventh line of the poem.

Line Six

Here's the sixth line.

Line Five

Here's the fifth line!

Line Four

The fourth line is at Random Noodling.

Line Three

Here's the third line of the Progressive Poem.

Line Two

Here's the second line of the Progressive Poem.

Poetry Friday: April

Welcome to April and to National Poetry Month!  I'm looking forward to all the celebrating.  The Progressive Poem has begun today, and you can see the first line here.

I posted this Emily Dickinson poem on the first of April in 2011, in the wake of the earthquake in Japan, noting that in spite of the destruction there, the cherry trees were in bloom as usual.  "Nicodemus' mystery" at the end of the poem refers to the man who came to Jesus at night and asked how people could be born again.  Spring is an illustration every year of rebirth.  Here in the tropics, where I live, the rebirth isn't necessarily as dramatic, since we don't have a real winter, but there are little evidences of nature's cycles all around.  Just outside my classroom window, the mahogany tree has all new spring-green leaves.

In my own life, I've been very aware of endings lately, and I'm looking forward to some new beginnings that must be just around the corner.  I don't see them yet, but I believe in resurrection, and springtime, and "Fern-odors on untravelled roads." 


April

Emily Dickinson

An altered look about the hills;
A Tyrian light the village fills;
A wider sunrise in the dawn;
A deeper twilight on the lawn;
A print of a vermilion foot;
A purple finger on the slope;
A flippant fly upon the pane;
A spider at his trade again;
An added strut in chanticleer;
An axe shrill singing in the woods;
Fern-odors on untravelled roads, -
All this, and more I cannot tell,
A furtive look you know as well,
And Nicodemus' mystery
Receives its annual reply.

Today's roundup is at The Poem Farm, where we're invited to wallow in wonder this month!  Yes, please!

Line One

Laura Purdie Salas has posted the first line of the Progressive Poem here.