As summer winds down, thoughts turn to the start of school. Each new year brings new faces new challenges, new curriculum, but poetry remains a constant. Krista Tippet’s interview with Naomi Shihab Nye on last week’s episode of On Being (a must-listen!) prompted me to revisit “Valentine for Ernest Mann” and think about where poems are hiding in my life.

Here is a draft of one I found outside my kitchen window one morning this week:

Poems hide.
They lie crouched in the tall grass
at the edge of a thicket
where each morning
a tawny rabbit emerges
to nibble his breakfast
of grass and sweet clover.
His ears stand at attention,
alert for the slightest sound,
eyes peeled
for the shadow of a hawk,
legs coiled in readiness
to flee back into
the safety of the thorns.

© Catherine Flynn, 2016

I’m looking forward to returning to school and learning where poems are hiding in the lives of my students.

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