“Song”
by Seamus Heaney

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

Please be sure to visit Jama Rattigan at Jama’s Alphabet Soup for the Poetry Friday Roundup. This week’s hostess with the mostest has some warm cider and apple cider doughnuts waiting for you!

Today is my birthday, and it’s a BIG one. There are many ways this birthday will not be normal, so I am excited to be celebrating the publication of HOP TO IT: Poems to Get You Moving instead. Hop to It is the latest anthology from the dynamic duo of Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell.

I am thrilled and honored to have my poem, “Mental Floss,” included with the work of so many stellar poets. Thank you, Janet & Sylvia, for your tireless efforts to bring poetry into the lives of so many!

I also love that fellow October birthday girl and poet extraordinaire Marilyn Singer’s Feel the Beat is the suggested companion piece to my poem.

Please be sure to visit Janice Scully at Salt City Verse for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

The Sunday Night Swaggers are back with another monthly challenge. This month, Margaret Simon challenged us to write a duplex, a form created by Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Jericho Brown.

Challenge is the keyword here. I really struggled with this poem. I struggled to come up with a topic, then struggled to keep the poem from becoming too dark. I also didn’t exactly follow the rules, but I know I wrote with the spirit of the rules in mind. That has to count for something, right?

The facts are hard to dismiss;
We’re at the edge of a vast abyss.

At the edge of this abyss, can we ignore
Tons of plastic littering our shores?

Plastic-lined shores still sparkle and shine
But they are a beacon of nature’s decline

Nature’s decline is our fault alone.
Is it too late for us to atone?

Before it’s too late to atone for our greed
Let’s join together, plant the seeds

Plant seeds for the future, seeds of hope
We must stop our slide down this slippery slope

Stopping this slide is a goal we can’t miss
These are facts that we cannot dismiss.

© Draft, Catherine Flynn, 2020

Please be sure to read the duplexes my fellow Swaggers wrote at their blogs:

Molly Hogan at Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe
Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche

Also, don’t forget to visit Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

 

This poem was written in honor of Lee Bennett Hopkins, a giant in the world of children’s poetry. Lee passed away on August 8th of this year. Today, the Poetry Friday community is sharing poetry honoring Lee. My contribution is a Golden Shovel using the title of Lee’s classic book, with phrases from some of Lee’s own poems woven in. Lee joyfully spread his love of poetry throughout the world, and his loss is immeasurable. How lucky we are that our lives were enriched by Lee, and that we have volumes and volumes of poetry to help keep his legacy alive.

Pass the Poetry, Please!

Italicized lines are from the following poems by Lee (in order of appearance):

“Under the Microscope” from Spectacular Science (Simon & Schuster, 1999)
“Librarian” from School People (Wordsong, 2018)
“Ruby” from Hoofbeats, Claws & Rippled Fins: Creature Poems (HarperCollins, 2002)
“Storyteller (For Augusta Baker)” from Jumping Off Library Shelves (Wordsong, 2015)
Introduction to I Am the Cat (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981)

And, of course, Pass the Poetry, Please!  a treasure trove of poetic love, containing “a wealth of ideas to encourage a child’s natural delight in poetry.” (from the back cover of my paperback of the revised edition, published by HarperTrophy in 1987.)

Please be sure to visit our gracious host, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, at The Poem Farm for more remembrances of Lee.

This year, our school has a single teacher for elementary science. He coordinates with classroom teachers, and has his own room where instruction takes place. For the past week or so, he has been incubating chicken eggs. The incubating process wasn’t too interesting, but all that changed when the eggs began to hatch. Everyone in the building has been visiting the newly hatched chicks. Of course I wrote a poem about them.

Bundles of damp down
Tumble into the world,
Cheeping and chirping.
Chicks rise, stumble
On brand new legs,
Spindly and pink.
They wobble back
And forth,
Unfold tiny wings
Then fall flat,
Worn out with effort.
They rest,
gather strength,
Then rise again,
Pause, find their
Footing.
Transformed into
Puffs of smoky down,
They scurry forward,
Ready to greet
the world.

© Catherine Flynn, 2019

Please be sure to visit Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Fake it till you make it. We’ve all heard it. We all know people who do it. We’ve all done it ourselves. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. I thought about this yesterday as I stood by the window in my classroom while my lunch was heating up. I looked out onto a playground filled with first and second graders reveling in the spring-like weather. Then I noticed three boys by the basketball hoop. Dribbling, passing the ball, taking shots. I thought about how much fun they were having, even though they didn’t come close to making a basket. They were practicing the moves they’d seen other, more seasoned players make.

As I watched, I thought about what else in life we approximate until we “make it.” Adulting, parenting, you name it, we fake it. Eventually we gain a certain level of competence and confidence. We don’t feel like we’re flying by the seat of our pants ALL the time! But what about our students? How much approximating do they do every day? It exhausts me to think about it.Which makes me wonder about our expectations. Perfect, polished writing is a challenge for us all. Why would we expect first graders to write flawlessly? We shouldn’t. What we should do is help them approximate being a writer, to copy the moves their favorite authors make. Sometimes their imperfections show us the most about their learning, about them as learners. So let’s make our classrooms places for taking risks that help us grow. That’s how we make it.

Thank you to everyone at Two Writing Teachers for this space where we can all take risks.

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Without intending to, I ended up taking a hiatus from blogging during October. I have missed all my poetry pals, though, so I’m determined to at least get pack to posting on Fridays.

In September, the lovely and generous Irene Latham invited her readers and friends to share “some octopus poems and art” to be featured on her blog during October, otherwise known as #NationalOctopusMonth. I’ve never been a huge fan of octopuses, but I am a HUGE fan of Irene and all her writing, so I dove into learning more about the fascinating creatures.

I soon discovered the wonderpus octopus (Wunderpus photogenicus), who lives in the coastal waters near Indonesia and Malaysia. This beautiful little octopus inspired this poem, “The Wondrous Wonderpus.”

 

 

Thank you again to Irene, for always being such an inspiration. Please be sure to visit Jama at Jama’s Alphabet Soup for the Poetry Friday Roundup!