As I left school one afternoon last week, snow had just started falling and an icy wind was picking up. Suddenly, six or seven robins flew across the parking lot, landing in a tree at the edge of the playground. The sight filled me with hope that spring will be here soon.  Here is a poem those robins inspired.

Robins,
plump and ruffled
against the snow,
swoop,
perch;
a maple tree
bursts into bloom.

© Catherine Flynn, 2019

Valerie Worth’s poem, “Robins,” also expresses the delight of the return of these harbingers of spring.

Look how
Last year’s
Leaves, faded
So gray
And brown,

Blunder
Along
Like flimsy
Flightless
Birds,

Stumbling
Beak over
Tail
Before
The wind.

But no,
Wait:
Today
They right
Themselves,

And turn
To the
Stout slate
And ruddy
Rust

Of robins,
Running
On steady
Stems across
The ground.

 

Don’t forget that next Friday, March 8th, is International Women’s Day. I’ll be hosting the Roundup that day and would love it if people help to celebrate the day by sharing poems that honor women. You can read more here.  Please be sure to visit Linda at Teacher Dance for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Last week, I shared some gleanings from poet and teacher Gregory Orr’s book A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry, specifically his thoughts about the distinction between lyric and narrative poetry. Orr acknowledges that these two poetic forms occur along a continuum, with very few poems being purely one or the other. He also observes that while “most poetry readers and writers have shifted toward lyric,

The narrative impulse is still powerfully present in all of us as a fundamental way of organizing experience into meaning.”

Orr includes an exercise at the end of this chapter, challenging his readers to write a narrative poem. He suggests writers “choose a figure who is known to you…then imagine that figure in a context.” Once you have these basic elements, “add yourself to the situation” and keep asking “what happens next?”

This poem is my response to the exercise. As with any prompt, I bent the rules a little, but kept true to Orr’s direction to “narrow the focus.”

My Grandmother Making Breakfast

She stands at the stove
in the center of her kitchen,
cracking eggs
into a cast iron frying pan.

I sit at her drop-front desk
in the corner by the window,
perched on a yellow stool,
trying to shuffle cards
in a collapsing arch,
the way my father does.

She stirs the eggs,
their sunflower yolks blooming
into the black pan.

My attention is on the cards,
my ten-year old hands
not quite dexterous enough
to manage the trick
of mingling and
mixing them.

Meanwhile, my grandmother
adds salt and pepper to the eggs,
now coalescing into fluffy mounds
and the warmth of the stove radiates
throughout the kitchen.

Soon, she will spoon our breakfast
onto flowered plates.
The cards will be scattered
on the desk, forgotten for now.

We will sit and eat.
She will sip her coffee;
I will sip Hi-C  from a glass
that once held shrimp cocktail.

But for now,
we are both focused
on the task at hand,
lost in our thoughts,
content to be alone
together.

© Catherine Flynn, 2019

Please be sure to visit Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Just a reminder about the Roundup on International Women’s Day (March 8th). I’m hosting that day thought it would be appropriate to celebrate the day by sharing poems that honor women. These could be original poems or poems written by others. They could be poems about an important woman in your life who deserves to be celebrated, someone famous, an unsung woman of historical significance, or a poem by your favorite female poet. The choice is yours. So please feel free to participate (or not) in any way that feels right to you. 

“Astonishment is the proper response to reality.”
~ Terence McKenna ~

This week, two astonishing yet unrelated news items filled me with wonder. The first was about the discovery of a series of “high-speed bursts of radio waves coming from deep space”.  The second was the story of the discovery of lapis lazuli in the teeth of a medieval nun. Somehow these amazing stories converged into this draft of a poem.

Hardly a trace
of her bustling world remains.

But there, cradled within her teeth,
flecks of brilliant ultramarine
cry out,
like a signal, bursting,
hurdling across space,
across time
until its pulse
is captured,

a forgotten voice
announcing,
“I was an artist.”

© Catherine Flynn, 2019

In case you missed it, last week I suggested a Poetry Friday celebration of women when I host the Roundup on March 8th, which is International Women’s Day. You can find all the details here. Please be sure to visit Kathryn Apel for the Poetry Friday Roundup!