Tag: Poetry Friday

Poetry Friday: The Laws of Motion

Catherine Flynn12 Comments

Summer is a time to kick back and relax, but for teachers it is also time to work on projects we don’t have time for during the school year. This summer, I’m excited that my critique group and I are reading The Practice of Poetry and completing the writing exercises as a way to build our poetry muscles. Our first “assignment” was “Experience Falls Through Language Like Water Through a Sieve” by Susan Mitchell. (You can read Margaret’s thoughts about this exercise here.)

The gist of this exercise is to “use similes and/or metaphors to convey a feeling, an idea, a mood, or an experience you have never been able to communicate to anyone because each time you tried it seemed that you were being untrue to the experience.” My response, as usually happens when we write, took me to an unexpected place. I haven’t ever shared this memory from high school and still feel guilty that I stood by while a guy I was trying to impress was so mean to a stranger. In her directions, Smith writes that “we often write ahead of our own understanding.” Sadly, we often live our lives ahead of them, too. And, as with writing, our “conscious thinking [has] to catch up.” Writing and reflecting hastens this process, but some lessons take longer than others. Thankfully, this was a lesson I only had to endure once. Figuring out that “simile and metaphor are functional, rather than decorative” and using them effectively may take me a little longer. 

The Laws of Motion

The first time I saw you,
your face reminded me of the scarred,
pock-marked surface of Io,
Jupiter’s volcanic moon.

How brave you were to walk
into that unknown space,
carrying a plastic tray filled
with tater tots,
as if that would shield you
from the shining stars
of our little galaxy.

A comet sailed among us that year,
pulled me into his orbit,
blinded me to right and wrong,
caused me to wobble on my axis
until I was so off-kilter that
I didn’t say a word
when he turned to you,
pelted you with cruelty and insults.

To this day, I’m ashamed
I wasn’t strong enough
to pull free of his hold on me.
Ashamed that I didn’t have your strength,
that I looked away,
as you strode by
with your head held high.

© Catherine Flynn, 2017

Please be sure to visit Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe (how appropriate!) for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: The Wonders Around Us

Catherine Flynn15 Comments

My summer writing goal:

Sing of the Earth and sky,
sing of our lovely planet,
sing of the low and high,
of fossils locked in granite.

Sing of the strange, the known,
the secrets that surround us,
sing of the wonders shown,
and the wonders still around us.

by Aileen Fisher

Thank you, Miss Fisher, for reminding me.

“A Night in Malibu” by Jeremy Bishop, via Unsplash

Please be sure to visit Carol at Carol’s Corner for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: “This Most Perfect Hill”

Catherine Flynn7 Comments

I’ve been neglecting this blog lately, but as school winds down and I can (fingers crossed) devote more time to writing, I decided to dust things off a bit and offer you this most perfect poem by Lisa Jarnot.

“This Most Perfect Hill”
by Lisa Jarnot

On this most perfect hill
with these most perfect dogs
are these most perfect people
and this most perfect fog

In this most perfect fog
that is the middle of the sea
inside the perfect middle of
the things inside that swing

In this most perfect rhyme
that takes up what it sees,
with perfect shelter from the
rain as perfect as can be,

In this most perfect day
at the apex of the sun
runs this most perfect
frog song that is roiling
from the mud

Read the rest of the poem here.

Please visit poetess extraordinaire Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: Mary Oliver’s “Mockingbirds”

Catherine Flynn16 Comments

“Mockingbirds”
by Mary Oliver

This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing

better to do
than listen.

Read the rest of the poem here.

By Charlesjsharp (Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography), via Wikimedia Commons

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

Poetry Friday: A Found Poem

Catherine Flynn10 Comments

Teachers often wonder about their true impact on students. We have work samples, observations and assessments that help us gauge a student’s progress. But these can’t really let us know the degree of influence we’ve had on a student. And in many cases we may never know. We’re like mother turtles burying our eggs in the sand, only to swim away and hope for the best.

But then there are moments when the stars align and magic happens. This morning I was working with a 5th grade student whom I’ve worked with to varying degrees since first grade. He’s quiet and shy, but very sweet. He’d rather play soccer than anything else, especially read. He read the first few lines in The Amazing Amazon, by David Meissner, (Reading A-Z) then stopped. Looking up at me, he said, “It’s like a poem.”

I. was. speechless. Recovering quickly, I said, “I agree.” I asked why he thought so. Again, his response blew me away.

“Well, it rhymes and it’s describing. It’s like I can see it.”

As I said, magic. Here is the poem E found.

“There Is a Place”

There is a place where monkeys swing and howl.
There is a place where jaguars leap from tree to tree.
Bananas and pineapples grow for free.
Tiny frogs live in flowers.
Pink-colored dolphins swim in the river.
Storms come often,
and the air is sweet.

By spacebirdy (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

Sweet indeed. 

Please be sure to visit Tara Smith at A Teaching Life for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: “Turtle Came to See Me”

Catherine Flynn13 Comments

For the past few weeks, my writing has taken a backseat to the busyness of life. One poem in particular has me stumped. So I went looking for models to emulate. I don’t think the structure of this poem, from Margarita Engle’s verse memoir Enchanted Air, will work for my poem, but it touched my heart.

“Turtle Came to See Me”
by Margarita Engle

The first story I ever write
is a bright crayon picture
of a dancing tree, the branches
tossed by island wind.

I draw myself standing beside the tree,
with a colorful parrot soaring above me,
and a magical turtle clasped in my hand,
and two yellow wings fluttering
on the proud shoulders of my ruffled
Cuban rumba dancer’s
fancy dress.

In my California kindergarten class,
the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES
DON’T LOOK LIKE THAT.

Read the rest of the poem here.

Please be sure to visit Jama Rattigan at Jama’s Alphabet Soup for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: Spring Tanka

Catherine Flynn16 Comments

“…seek the resonance that enters a poem only when it is touched by the stillness of nature.”
~ Margarita Engle ~

Spring has finally arrived in my corner of Connecticut! The forsythia have been ablaze for the last two weeks, and greening lawns are dotted with dandelions. Everywhere you look, the world is abloom. For this final week of National Poetry Month, I decided to revisit Margarita Engle’s tanka challenge for Michelle Heidenrich Barnes’s Today’s Little Ditty Challenge. Even though there is nothing still about spring, the beauty of the season resonates deep within me.

Lithe limbs arch and bend
trimmed with a thousand blossoms,
ballerinas,
graced in frilly pink tutus,
chasséing on a spring breeze.

                                   

On a southern slope,
columns of bright daffodils
raise their trumpets high
and play a rousing fanfare
heralding winter’s retreat.

© Catherine Flynn, 2017

Thank you, Michelle, for inviting us to your DMC Potluck this month! Be sure to visit Michelle’s to read more poetic offerings. And don’t forget to visit JoAnn Early Macken at Teaching Authors for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: Responding to Rilke

Catherine Flynn10 Comments

In February, I took part in Laura Shovan’s Found Poetry Project on Facebook. (Read more about this here.) Everyone agreed we wanted to continue the project with a new set of ten words each month. For April, Heather Meloche found ten words in “Early Spring” by Rainer Maria Rilke to inspire new poems.  From these words, (vanished, softness, meadows, rivulets, tendernesses, earth, subtle, risings, expression, and trees) I zeroed in on “rivulets.” Our family has been kayaking forever, and spring is a paddler’s favorite season, especially here in the Northeast. As I worked through my ideas, I realized I wanted a tighter form and that my lines were arranging themselves into tanka-like rhythms on their own. So I created a series of tanka for early spring.

Vanishing snow digs
furrows in softening earth.
Trickling toward the sea,
icy rivulets quench the
thirst of stirring roots and buds.

Joining together
in rising streams and rivers,
subtlety is lost.
A cauldron of froth and foam
bubbles up into being.

Growing impatient,
cascading over boulders,
water expresses
its overwhelming power,
sweeping away winter’s dregs.

© Catherine Flynn, 2017

My son Michael, facing spring’s froth and foam.

Please be sure to visit Doraine Bennett at Dori Reads for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Poetry Friday: The Glass Universe

Catherine Flynn18 Comments

“For me poetry has always been a way of paying attention to the world.”
~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~

Confession: I worked on four or five poems last night, attempting to wrestle one of them into shape to share today. No luck. A rhyme wouldn’t work in one, the details weren’t there in another. Finally, I decided to sleep on it. But before I went to sleep, I read a few pages of Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe, a fascinating account of how a small group of women working at Harvard University at the turn of the last century uncovered and catalogued ground-breaking discoveries about the stars. Sobel’s writing is masterful and poetic, and as I read one passage, I found a haiku hiding in her prose.

a river of stars,
the Milky Way spills across
the night’s horizon

By Steve Jurvetson (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Please be sure to visit Irene Latham at Live Your Poem for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

 

SOL 17 & Poetry Friday: “Feather, Celebrating Valerie Worth”

Catherine Flynn21 Comments

                                          

“The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world.”
~ Natalie Goldberg ~

Last week, I shared Kwame Alexander, Chris Colderly, and Marjory Wentworth’s inspirational new poetry collection, Out of Wonder. Each poem is a celebration of another poet, either written in their style or about a topic dear to them.

Of course I wanted to try my hand at this. I found a lone turkey feather in the snow after the blizzard a few weeks ago that had been calling to me. I decided Valerie Worth’s “small poems” were the perfect model to use for a poem about this little gift.

After reading and rereading All the Small Poems and Fourteen More, I watched Renée LaTulippe’s interview with Lee Bennett Hopkins about Valerie Worth. Lee described Worth’s poems as “sharp, solid, eloquent evocations of ordinary objects” that “causes us to see the everyday world in fresh, insightful, larger-than-life ways.” Easy, right?

Of course not. Lee also said that Worth was “truly a craftsperson, who wrote, revised, wrote, and revised.” Knowing that no poem is ever finished, I have written and revised, written and revised my attempt at a “small poem” about a feather.

Feather
celebrating Valerie Worth

On turkey’s back,
a feather is
filaments of color
weaving a cloak
of shadow and light
that hides and
protects.

Fallen on the snow,
this downy tuft
transforms into
treasure,
whispering secrets
of the woods.

© Catherine Flynn, 2017

It seems appropriate that this final day of the 2017 Slice of Life Challenge is on a Friday. I’m certain I wouldn’t ever have had the confidence to write and share poetry if it hadn’t been for this supportive community. My heartfelt thanks to you all, especially Stacey, Betsy, Beth, Kathleen, Deb, Melanie, Lisa and Lanny for creating this community and providing this space for teachers and others to share their stories every day in March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts. Also, be sure to visit Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm for the Poetry Friday Roundup.