T.S. Eliot claimed that “April is the cruelest month” but I think teachers might argue that August is a close second. Unfinished summer projects taunt us; unorganized classrooms beckon. Add to all that the Inklings’ monthly challenge. Something had to give. You guessed it. It was the challenge.
For our September challenge, Margaret Simon asked us to “Choose a photo from the month of This Photo Wants to be a Poem and share your poem and your process.” Every week, Margaret shares a photo on Facebook as a poetry prompt, a tradition that began with Laura Purdie Salas.
I knew immediately which photo I wanted to write to:
The fields around my house are full of this grass right now and I’m always awed by its beauty. But what to write? I pondered and wrote notes. After several false starts, I began looking at the other photos. Then, while Heidi Mordhorst, Mary Lee Hahn, Michelle Kogan, and I were discussing Ada Limón‘s enchanting new book, The Hurting Kind, someone said that many of Limon’s lines would be good strike lines for a Golden Shovel. All at once, everything clicked. I knew which line would work perfectly with this photo.
“…amidst the perpetual
scattering that unspools the world.”Ada Limón
(from “It’s the Season I Often Mistake”)
Thank you to Margaret for posing this challenge. Thank you to Heidi, Mary Lee, and Michelle for the insightful and stimulating conversation about The Hurting Kind. If you haven’t already read how my fellow Inklings responded to this challenge, please visit them at their blogs:
Mary Lee Hahn @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Heidi Mordhorst @ My Juicy Little Universe
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche
Also be sure to visit Kat Apel for the Poetry Friday Roundup.
Reading to the Core 
Beautiful! I like the way you used the line from Ada Limón. Neat idea to make a Golden Shovel.
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Catherine,
I love this draft of your poem you posted a few minutes ago. I had just ordered Ada Limon’s book. Her line works so perfectly to build your poem— beautiful. I kept moving back and forth between your words and the photo— “invisible threads keeping us tethered to the world.” Thank you for the calm of this poem in the chaos of this world.
Linda
>
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Perfection! I love your golden shovel – and the process that inspired it. (And I think we might have that grass – or atleast, something very similar!)
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Marvelous found line & I love your special words surrounding it, Catherine, especially “as the year unspools its invisible thread”. The grass is beautiful, an autumn treasure!
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That’s a powerful last line, and it feels so much like an ending line of
Aida Limón‘s ” the filament keeping us tethered to the world.” You offer us such natural beauty and then the world balancing by that precarious filament–wonderful, thanks!
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I’m still swooning over this…
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Beautiful golden shovel!!!
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Beautiful golden shovel!
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Those golden spikelets! I love how you’ve woven an amazing new poem from Ada Limon’s line.
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That word, “unspool” is the star of that poem. I just love it. Maybe we teachers should sing, “A Little Help from my Friends,” at the end of every August. There is just SO much to do!
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Those last three lines are stunning. I agree with Linda “unspool” is the star of the show.
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Mmm… perpetual rhythm rounding into… A perfect accompaniment for the photo.
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That wondrous filament, part of the threads connecting all of us…
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I also like the last three lines and feel that untethered is such a vital word inside your golden shovel, Catherine.
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