Welcome to Poetry Friday! Thank you, Susan Bruck, for hosting here at Soul Blossom Living.
I’ve kept busy this week revising work. I’ve also been reading Mark Twain’s, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Fin. I’ve never read them cover to cover. Twain writes characters with heart breaking humanity. For instance, Twain Huck is unable to be “good” and turn in Jim, an escaped slave, to authorities. He knows if he were a well bred boy and had good character, he would. Twain shows us through character, how slavery corrupted American society. Through his work, we can gain insight into how we became the America we are today.
For an adventure, I baked this week. I have always wanted to make pita bread, and I was surprisingly successful. I read the directions carefully and found it wasn’t that hard. They were crisp and tasty and I surprised my neighbor from Lebanon with some. I used the recipe in my old Fanny Farmer Baking Book, but there are many good recipes on line. Here’s one.
Here are the pita before their plunge into a 500 degree oven . . .
Welcome to another Poetry Friday! We are hosted today by Linda at TeacherDance. Make sure to stop and see what poetic intrigue she is up to.
This has been another horrible week in the national news and I fear for my Asian friends and family members. How can they not feel threatened by the racial violence that is taking place, it seem, all over the country? Meanwhile the pandemic will continue for a while. I’m sure, like me, many turn to nature for some solace.
This week while walking down a street I began to notice the squirrels’ nests in the highest branches of trees. They are uncovered in the winter because leaves have fallen. They inspired a poem that I will share, but first, I discovered this poem by Amos Russel Wells who was born in Glen’s Falls, N.Y., during the Civil War. I thought his poem was charming.
To A City-Park Squirrel
by Amos Russel Wells
Dear little exile from woodlands dear,
How can you keep your wilderness grace,
How can you bound so merrily here,
Shut in this narrow and formal place?
Still your fancies are forest-free,
Still as gallant you swing and glide
From dusty tree to skeleton tree
As once you roamed through the woodlands wide.
Surely you must, on a witching night,
Flee from the prisoning haunts of men,
Over the housetops take your flight,
And bathe yourself in the woods again!
It’s easy to imagine this squirrel taking flight! (Actually, I wouldn’t mind fleeing into a city, like New York, to satisfy my pandemic travel fever.) Anyway, the poem resonated with me because as I looked at the squirrels’ nests this week on my street, I began to imagine they lived in high rises. This isn’t the first time these furry and common creatures have showed up in my writing.
Welcome to Poetry Friday, the coming of Spring edition. Heidi Mordhorst, at My Juicy Little Universe, is hosting HERE. Be sure to stop by to see what poems she is sharing this week.
Spring is coming to Central New York and everything seems imbued with new hope. They are lowering the age for vaccines and people are lining up. I don’t think it’s too wishful to believe that as time goes on more and more people everwhere will agree to take it.
Today, I waited for a LaMiPoFri to come to me as I stared out my living room window at the early spring colors, mostly brown, but some green. I noticed my husband left a ladder by the porch.
THE BOTTICELLIAN TREES, by William Carlos Williams, provides images of trees changing in spring. Trees/ alphabet metaphor to me was unusual. It’s a lovely poem. Below is the beginning, and the rest HERE
THE BOTTICELLIAN TREES
The Alphabet of
the trees
is fading in the
song of the leaves
the crossing
bars of the thin
letters that spelled
winter
and the cold
have been illuminated
with
pointed green
by the rain and sun--
I hope everyone is well and enjoying the first days of spring, at least they are the first days in Central New York.
It’s the first Friday of March (where has the time gone?) and a new month of Poetry Fridays. Thank you Kathryn Apel for hosting this week at Katwhiskers! She has an inspiring post and acrostic poem about writing, persistence and passion. Congratulations to her on her new picture book, “A Bird in the Herd.”
I have been polishing a work in progress, a collection of non-fiction poems for third grade about something we all know about, the wonder of digestion. I have been thinking about humor and what facts to include where.
Though I didn’t get to every February prompt offered by Laura Shovan, I gave one or two a try every week. The poem I want to share this week is from a prompt by Randi Sonenshine on day #25, using this photo for inspiration.
The prompt is about the ways living things try to blend in. The photo above is of an octopus that is disguised as coral. I’m not sure I see it, but that is the point, isn’t it? The master of disguise, the walking stick, aka stick bug, came to mind.
Stick bugs are found all over the world except Antarctica or Patagonia. They can be a foot long, but most are several inches. They are fascinating to look at because it’s hard to tell at first if it is a twig or a bug.
There are about 3,000 species and usually they will reside in one single tree their whole life, eating its leaves. Oaks are popular. They live about one year and survive mainly by their ability to avoid detection by taking on the color and texture of wood, although some use unpleasant secretions and sharp spines to defend themselves.
I have no idea if Lady Gaga wants to avoid the paparazzi but I imagine she does, at least on Sunday morning.
Good luck to our teachers as they get vaccines soon and children returning safely to school. With children in mind, I’ll close with a joyful verse by William Blake. We all know how children want to play and resist coming back indoors at the end of a summer day. Hopefully kids will have more freedom this summer.
NURSE'S SONG
by William Blake
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.
"Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies."
"No, no let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep.
"Well, well, go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed."
The little ones leaped & shouted & Laugh'd
And all the hills echoed.
