Last week I shared the section of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself that includes this line:
“…you shall possess the good of the earth and sun…”
As I read and reread this poem, a Golden Shovel started to form in my mind.
Please be sure to visit the talented and lovely Irene Latham at Live Your Poem for the Poetry Friday Roundup.
I was two years old when John F. Kennedy declared “we chose to go to the moon…and do other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Space exploration was woven into the background of my childhood, and it has always captivated me. So I was paying close attention last week as the Cassini spacecraft met its fiery end in Saturn’s butterscotch clouds. Cassini and its mission to explore Saturn, its rings, and moons seemed like a worthy subject for Michelle Barnes’s September ditty challenge from Carole Boston Weatherford.
It soon became clear, though, that writing an abecedarian about Saturn and the Cassini mission would be hard! It threatened to become a list of some of Saturn’s 53 named moons. Not giving up, I expanded my focus to include the whole universe and came up with this draft.
Astral bodies:
comets,
dwarf planets with
eccentric orbits,
frozen moons,
glowing stars,
haloes of hydrogen and helium
illuminating
jet black space,
kindling wonder,
launching dreams to
mine the mysteries of
nebulous interstellar dust, the
Oort cloud,
pulsing quasars, and
rotating
spiral galaxies
tumbling through the
universe, emitting
visible and invisible
wavelengths of light and
X-rays,
yielding amazement and awe, our
zeal for discovery never-ending.
© Catherine Flynn, 2017
Please be sure to head over to Amy Ludwig Vanderwater’s Poem Farm for the Poetry Friday Roundup!
This picture, taken at the Highlights Foundation last year, popped up in my Facebook feed this morning:
What a magical few days I had there, spending time with Rebecca, Georgia and so many other Poetry Friday friends! It made me realize how far I’ve drifted from my poetry practice and how much I miss it. In “What to Remember When Waking,” David Whyte asks “What shape waits in the seed of you/to grow and spread its branches/against a future sky?” I love the endless possibilities contained in this question. With renewed resolve, I can’t wait to find out.
“What to Remember When Waking”
by David Whyte
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Read the rest of the poem here.
Please be sure to visit Michelle Heidenrich Barnes at Today’s Little Ditty for the Poetry Friday Roundup.
This week I’ve been reading poemcrazy: freeing your life with words (1996) by Susan Goldmsith Wooldridge. I found this book as I was scrolling though my Twitter feed a few weeks ago. If you aren’t familiar with it, go find it now. You won’t be sorry.
Sometimes writing poems does drive me crazy, but this book makes you fall-in-love crazy about poetry. Wooldridge is a cheerful, enthusiastic teacher. In the first section of the book, “Following Words”, she urges us to collect words and “create a wordpool.” “The great thing about collecting words,” she writes, “is they’re free; you can borrow them, trade them in or toss them out.” Each short chapter is followed by suggestions for practice. This draft grew out of those suggestions.
The canary sun
sets the sky aglow,
whispering pink
at the edge of day
like a conch,
whispering
the memory
of ocean waves.
Please be sure to visit Matt Forrest Esenwine at Radio, Rhythm, & Rhyme for the Poetry Friday Roundup. And to all my friends around the country who are facing hurricanes or fires, please stay safe!
This fall I’m teaching a six-week exploratory course on gardening to 4th and 5th graders. Six weeks isn’t much time, but we’ve already suspended an avocado pit in water, planted oregano, and brainstormed a list of questions we want to answer. Later today we’ll be planting potatoes and next week we’re starting herb gardens.
In addition to all these seeds sprouting, I’d like some writing to blossom during our course. A “things to do” list poem is a form we can collaborate on, and lends itself nicely to a short time frame. Here is a poem I drafted to use as a model.
Things to do if you’re a seed…
nestle into rich, warm soil
soak up plenty of water
swell like a sponge
split your coat
plunge thirsty roots deep into the earth
poke an eager stem into the air
sprout feathery leaves
drink up the sun’s shimmering rays
then grow…
© Catherine Flynn, 2017
Please be sure to visit Kathryn Apel for the Poetry Friday Roundup.
Yesterday was National Root Beer Float Day. I love that there is a National day for almost everything, and I was especially happy to have an excuse to make a root beer float. When we were little, my sister and I spent a lot of time with our grandmother, especially during the summer. Her house was surrounded by shady maple trees that kept us cool, but on sweltering afternoons, nothing beat the heat like a root beer float.
Grandma had tall pink plastic tumblers that were reserved for these warm-weather treats. Joanie and I got them from the cupboard while Grandma took the ice cream from the freezer and the cans of root beer from the fridge. She scooped two precise balls of Sealtest vanilla into each cup. Then she slowly poured in the root beer, trying to prevent streams of bubbly foam from erupting over the rim.
We sat together at the kitchen table and sipped as the icebergs of softening ice cream dissolved into crystal-coated blobs. We laughed at the foamy mustaches on our upper lips. Grandma never threw anything away, so we used long-handled, red plastic spoons from Carvel’s to scoop out the last remnants of the ice cream from the bottom of the cup, savoring the creamy blend of sweet and sharp flavors, the perfect antidote for a hot summer day.
Those plastic tumblers are long gone, and I don’t think Sealtest Ice Cream is even made anymore, but that didn’t stop me from savoring a root beer float yesterday. It was just as delicious as I remembered.
Thank you also to Stacey, Betsy, Beth, Kathleen, Deb, Melanie, and Lanny for creating this community and providing this space for teachers and others to share their stories each Tuesday. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
My week has been filled with birds. (If you’re a frequent reader, you might be asking yourself, “What else is new?”) At the beginning of the week, I made may way to a new Audubon Center near my home for an early morning bird walk. Then I finished Mozart’s Starling (which I wrote about here). I really loved this book. Haupt ends by deftly weaving the threads of her starling Carmen, Mozart, and artists of every stripe into a reflection on the nature of creativity. “And what is this wild summons?” Haupt asks. “To listen with changed ears and sing back what we hear.”
Inspired by these words, here is a tanka filled with the sounds from my week.
As the last stars fade,
robins and cardinals sense
dawn’s approaching warmth.
Trills and cheeps float from treetops
chasing away night’s shadows.
© Catherine Flynn, 2017
How often do we go down rabbit holes in search of one thing, only to come out on the other side with something else altogether? Maybe not as often as we should.
This week I’m reading Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s captivating book, Mozart’s Starling. (Little, Brown, 2017). At one point, she quotes French poet Paul Éluard: “There is another world, but it is in this one.” This idea launches Haupt into a rumination on wonder. Did you know the root of “wonder” is an Old English word, wundrian that means “to be affected by one’s own astonishment”? Isn’t that lovely? Haupt ends this brief passage with this: “For us, the song of the world so often rises in places we had not thought to look.” These are the words of a poet.
Curious about her, I discovered that Haupt “is a naturalist, eco-philosopher, and speaker whose writing is at the forefront of the movement to connect people with nature in their everyday lives.”
But no poetry.
Back to Paul Éluard. The Poetry Foundation has two of Éluard’s poems, but neither of them really appealed to me. What did catch me eye was the poem of the day by Linda Pastan. Pastan is a favorite, so I clicked on the link to find this:
“At the Air and Space Museum”
by Linda Pastan
When I was
nearly six my
father
opened his magic
doctor bag:
two
tongue depressors fastened by
a rubber
band:
one flick
Read the rest here.
Even before I finished reading, I could feel my own poem taking shape. The ideas in this poem had been floating around my brain for the last month or so, but hadn’t settled on a form.
“Metamorphosis”
When I was
nearly ten
I taught myself
to embroider:
clutched a needle threaded
with magenta yarn
looped chains of stitches
tentative and uneven
until a form emerged:
butterfly wings.
© Catherine Flynn, 2017
Thank you for following me down the rabbit hole! Please be sure to visit my friend and critique group partner, Linda Mitchell, at A Word Edgewise for the Poetry Friday Roundup.
We haven’t filled our bird feeders for months because we don’t want bears wandering through our yard, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still bringing us beauty and inspiration. I found this lovely visitor tucked into a corner that doesn’t get mowed. What better form than a Fibonacci for a poem about a sunflower?
A
dropped
seed, long
forgotten,
grows summer surprise:
one blossoming, buttery sun.
© Catherine Flynn, 2017
Please be sure to visit Katie at The Logonauts for the Poetry Friday Roundup!
Happy National Macaroni and Cheese Day! Last week, Tabatha Yeatts, today’s PF Roundup hostess, suggested we celebrate this delectable dish in verse. Coincidentally, I had just read Rita Dove’s prompt, “Your Mother’s Kitchen” in The Practice of Poetry. Dove directs writers to include “the oven… and also something green.” My draft deviates from the instructions slightly by not including “something dead,” and not having a female relation “walk into the kitchen during the course of the poem.” My sister doesn’t like to cook and wouldn’t have been anywhere near the kitchen while my mother was cooking!
Healing Hands
My mother’s hands
were healing hands.
After standing all day
helping doctors stitch
broken bodies back together,
she came home to
tend and mend us.
When she was seven,
my sister suffered
from chronic strep.
Soft and smooth
on her raw throat,
my mother’s macaroni and cheese
was all she’d eat.
In the kitchen, my mother
gathered milk, butter, and cheese.
Velveeta was the cheese of choice.
She took the foil-wrapped
brick from its bright yellow box,
diced it into chunks.
Standing in front
of the avocado green stove,
she whisked the mornay sauce,
stirred until the liquid
was smooth and golden,
then poured it over
steaming macaroni
waiting in a pyrex dish.
Into the oven it went,
where it transformed into a
creamy, bubbling concoction.
To this day,
whenever I see a box of Velveeta,
I can taste the macaroni and cheese
my mother used to make
with her healing hands.
© Catherine Flynn, 2017
Of course I had to make a batch, just to make sure I had the details right. 😉
Reading to the Core 