Last weekend, my friend and critique group partner, Margaret Simon, asked on Twitter: “Who’s interested in writing #poemsofpresence? … We can create a calm May 2021 to end the weirdest school year ever.”

It definitely has been the weirdest school year ever. And calm is always welcome. So I have been reminding myself to be present this week to what Kathryn Aalto calls “nature’s palliative powers.” (Writing Wild, p. 237) Here are two poems of presence, inspired by the busy-ness of the apple tree in my front yard.

Fib for the Bees

quick
bees
darting
from blossom
to blossom, sipping
nectar, pollen dusting bellies
making honey for bees, apples for you and me.

Draft © 2021, Catherine Flynn

Rest Stop

Warblers on the wing
heading north to nest
pause to refuel
in the welcoming arms
of an old apple tree.

Draft © 2021, Catherine Flynn

Please be sure to visit Bridget Magee at Wee Words for Wee Ones for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

T.S. Eliot may think that “April is the cruelest month,” but I’m over March and looking forward to National Poetry Month. I’ve been planning a project that I’m excited about, but am not ready to share the details today. While I was tidying up my classroom this afternoon it occurred to me that some book spine poetry would be a good way to warm up for next month. Here are a few short poems, courtesy of some of my favorite authors.

Looking forward to seeing you all next week for the beginning of National Poetry Month. In the meantime, be sure to visit Susan Bruck at Soul Blossom Living for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

It’s the first Friday of March. Time for another Sunday Swagger Challenge. Each month, one member of my critique group poses a challenge for us all to respond to. This month, Margaret Simon posed a very flexible prompt: “Using any book, choose three page numbers. On the chosen pages, find one word to use. Write a poem.”

This seemed very manageable. One of my students has been reading Kate DiCamillo’s books, and Kate’s exquisite use of language has always inspired me, so I pulled a copy of Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures off the shelf and found these three words: variations, floating, glowing

An image of clouds came into my head as I considered these words. Here is the draft I came up with:

Clouds

Tenuous ideas cling together,
like water droplets fusing
into wisps of clouds floating
in an azure sky.

Slowly, word by word,
a line forms.
Line follows line
until they coalesce 
into a poemling,
glowing with promise.

Maybe this baby poem,
fragile as it is,
is a variation on an old theme.

No matter.
Just as clouds come in all
shapes and sizes,
possibilities for poems
are infinite.

And so we keep on
writing.

Draft, © 2021, Catherine Flynn

Please be sure to visit my fellow Swaggers to read their responses to Margaret’s challenge:

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

Then be sure to head to Kat Apel’s blog for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Every month, one of my critique group partners poses a challenge to the group and we all post our responses on the first Friday of the month. This month, it was my turn to come up with a prompt. Since life has been challenging enough lately, I wanted to pose more of a supportive opportunity than a challenge. This passage from S. Kirk Walsh’s essay “How E.L. Doctorow Taught an Aspiring Writer to Hear the Sounds of Fiction” in The New York Times Book Review was exactly what I had in mind:

For the final writing assignment, Doctorow asked us to choose one of the works on the syllabus and borrow — or steal — from it in a fiction of our own... I chose “The Waves”: I copied Woolf’s sentences word for word, then replaced her language with my own.

So our challenge was simply this: Copy a mentor poem (or other text) “word for word, then replace [that poet’s] language with your own.” Finding a mentor poem was easier than I thought it would be. Looking for another book, I found Light & Shadow (Holiday House, 1992), a book of poems by Myra Cohn Livingston inspired by photographs by Barbara Rogasky. Livingston’s poem, “Late Afternoon,” caught my attention immediately.

“Light rests
in the crooked
elbows and branches of
old trees,

drowses
in the shadows
of moss-covered rocks, naps
In piles

of leaves
scattered over
forest floors, stretches out
to sleep

and dreams
itself wearing
a shining necklace of
dewdrops.”

Isn’t that stunning?

Here is the poem my “borrowing” inspired:

Winter Morning

Light seeps
through the outstretched
fingers and branches of
bare trees,

rouses
birds, roosted
in a tangle of brush, quickens
the blood

of cardinals and jays,
who flutter around
snow-covered feeders, reaches 
deep into the shadows

and dreams
itself wearing
an iridescent crown of
feathers.

Draft, © 2021, Catherine Flynn

Please visit my fellow Sunday Night Swaggers to see where their borrowings led them:

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

Then head over to Jone Rush MacCulloch’s lovely blog for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

Is it still January? It hardly seems possible. My coping strategy for the tumult of the past few weeks has been knitting: 8 hats since Christmas. All that knitting equals very little time for writing. But I miss the routine of Poetry Friday. So today I’m sharing a poem I wrote back in December for a workshop with Georgia Heard. As always, Georgia inspired us to stretch ourselves by writing variations on the cinquain. This draft is a butterfly cinquain, a “nine-line syllabic verse of the pattern 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 / 2 / 8 / 6 / 4 / 2.” It needs more work, but it’s an important reminder for me today.

Resilience

A wild
verdant glade where
feathery ferns unfurl,
moss creeps into every hollow.
Air hums
alive with rustling cicadas,
while sprouts stir in ancient
spruce stumps: fragile
saplings.

Draft, © Catherine Flynn, 2021

Please be sure to visit Jan Godown Annino at Bookseedstudio for the Poetry Friday Roundup!