Month: May 2022

Upside-down

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Linda Mitchel at her blog HERE. Thank you, Linda, for hosting!

If you would like to know what Poetry Friday is, find out from poet, Renee LaTulippe, HERE.

I’m using the above image to express how I feel after this week’s violence in Buffalo and now in a Texas School. Am I the only one who feels insane hearing explanations about why gun control is impossible? A conservative Texas lawmaker was asked why 18 year olds should be sold weapons. He said that since eighteen year old boys bear arms in the military, they should be able to bear arms outside the military.

I thought about that. I tried to understand that from my own experience. When my brother, 20, was in Vietnam, he was trained how to use a weapon and when he was discharged, he didn’t come home with a machine gun, not that I can recall. He didn’t walk the streets of our small town carrying a gun and I never heard him complain about the lack of it, rather was glad to be free of it and the war.

In the new anthology IMPERFECT ll, edited by Tabatha Yeatts, there is a perfect poem to express how I feel this week and will for quite a while. (Tabatha gave me permission to share it.) 

UPSIDE-DOWN
by Robert Schechter

Don't tell me that I'm upside-down! 

   My top's where it should be!

If you're convinced I'm flipped around,

   then blame yourself, not me.

This kingdom isn't yours to rule.

   You wear no monarch's crown.

Why can't you see I'm right-side-up?

   It's you who's upside down.

I hope, because I have to, that through reason and compassion, the U.S. can get its priorities straight.

Thank you, Linda, for hosting. I love to share one of my own poems, but I don’t have anything new. But I have this one that I shared previously from Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell’s book, THINGS WE DO, which celebrates an everyday joy of childhood. 

KICK

By Janice Scully

Brass shaker
worm waker

Hi popper
cloud topper

Ball smasher
goal crasher

Tie breaker
score maker

Watch me
KICK!

Have a good weekend.

Janice

Two Haiku and Two Novels

Welcome to Poetry Friday! Today we are hosted by Carmela at Teaching Authors. Here. Stop by and see what she has for us today.

What is Poetry Friday? Find out more HERE.

I didn’t post last week. Things have been hectic but I’ve been reading and there are two novels I’d like to share them with you.

But first, an haiku.

The following greeted me in my in-box from Poets.org this week. 

ONE FLOWER
by Jack Kerouac 1922-1969

One flower
   on the cliffside
Nodding at the canyon

This little verse captures a moment, and the beauty in it for me is the image of something small and beautiful, calm, simply there, and brave in the face of an abyss, here in the form of a canyon. It seemed a perfect beginning to this post as both novels are about courage. They are both written in prose.

The first is a fabulous middle grade novel entitled ONE SMALL HOP, by author Madelyn Rosenberg, published in 2021 by Scholastic Press.

The abyss in this novel, like the canyon in Kerouac’s haiku, is climate change. The main Character, a seventh grade boy named Ahab, and his friends live in a dark futuristic setting. The young characters in this novel their reality head on.

Most animals are extinct. The sea has risen, the water is toxic and children live inside most of the time. But when a lone male frog is discovered by one of Ahab’s friends, the kids focus on the possibility of saving the frog species. To do it, they must smuggle a frog across toxic terrain into Canada, where they have located a lone female frog. Will the kids introduce the frogs and create a new future?

I expected to find this book devoid of hope. Read it and I promise you will be uplifted by Rosenberg’s story and humor.

The other novel I read is HEARTS UNBROKEN, a YA novel by bestselling author Cynthia Leitich Smith. Like her main character Louise, She is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

Louise sits on the canyon/ abyss of racism. She is working on the school newspaper. Her little brother, also Muskcogee, has been cast as the Tin Man in the school play, The Wizard of Oz, and a black girl, a talented singer, has been casted as Dorothy.

When the wrath of the parents in this mostly white school come down against the casting of the play, (Obviously, complained white parents, they got the parts only because they were minorities). Louise and her brother get caught up in the swirl of anger which leads to a grave threat of physical danger.

But Smith has crafted a page turner and we see believable conflict play out in several compelling story lines as truth battles misinformation and prejudice. Readers will see, and understand, through this story, the hatred all minorities are up against day after day in America.

One last haiku. 

SUMMER READING

On a beach, at home,
or shadowed by deep green leaves,
stories fill the hush.

©Janice Scully 2022

Thank you, Carmela, for hosting.

Imperfect ll, A Poetry Anthology for Middle Schoolers

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by the amazing Jama on her blog, Jama’s Alphabet Soup, HERE . Make sure you stop by and see the art and poetry she is sure to share.

Poetry can provide a vacation from the small intense worlds in which kids and all of us live day to day. IMPERFECT II, edited by Tabatha Yeatts, is a thoughtful and also entertaining poetry anthology of eighty poems that in different ways address the notion of perspective. This collection will give the middle school audience ways to think about what they see happening, the stress, all the things that seem in any given moment more important than they really are. This is Yeatt’s second anthology after IMPERFECT: Poems about Mistakes.

One of the first poems, in IMPERFECT ll, is “Compared to What?” by Robert Schechter. Written in rhyming quatrains, the poem shows his fun take on perspective. Here are the first three stanzas (out of eleven) 

Compared to What?
by Robert Schecter

A pebble isn't all that big
   compared to stones or boulders,
but it's a mountain to the ant
   who lifts it on its shoulders.

And if you were a molecule,
   an atom or a proton,
a water drop would be a lake
   for you to sail your boat on.

An elephant is huge for sure;
   its trunk would crush your scale.
And yet it doesn't seem that large
   if you're a humpback whale.

The rest of Schechter’s poem takes us into outer space to consider the sizes of stars and galaxies, that make the pebble or a whale seem small, because it provides a different perspective.

Wisdom is sprinkled generously throughout the anthology in poems such as this:

It takes a lot of courage and strength
to change yourself. You need to be brave
enough to look at what is better for you
and change for that. 

Matt Haig

And here’s one free verse poem that certainly speaks to me, as I remember times when I said the wrong thing and relived that horrid moment for days or much longer:

RUMINATION
by Stanley Dunlap

It's over,
so why
does my brain want to
revisit
reimagine
recreate
What I COULD have said
What I SHOULD have said?

As hard as I try
to get it right
in all these scenarios,
I will
never change what has already happened.

Perhaps I should
stop the endless imagining
of what might have been
give myself a break
and know that I have surely learned
surely grown
and will surely 
do better 
next time.

These are just a few examples and there are many great more poems in this book that are accessible to young readers and fun to read. They might help adults begin conversations with kids about topics that teachers and parents might need a nudge to initiate.

IMPERFECT II ends with back matter about positive thinking and also tips on releasing tension with deep breathing. I think these end chapters would have been helpful to me as a young person.

Imperfect ll can be purchased on Amazon, HERE.

Speaking of perspective, passing though St. Louis recently, I felt small indeed next to the famous arch there. I had no idea it was so big.

Another place to gain a sense of perspective is Badlands National Park in S. Dakota, that filled the horizon.

Imperfect ll can be purchased on Amazon, HERE. I wish all a wonderful weekend, and if you’re in a temperate climate, daffodils, new leaves on trees and forsythias.

Thank you Jama for hosting!