April begins National Poetry Month! So many poets/bloggers I’ve met on Poetry Friday, have begun National Poetry Month projects. So I think it’s about time, the last hour and a half of April First, the first day of NPM, to begin a project, too.
I would like to write more of the short ancient illusive form called the haiku. It’s a familiar short form that looks easy but isn’t. So my celebration of NPM will be to try to write one haiku, maybe two a day, based on something I would like to remember, like a snapshot.
Today I discovered my first haiku while raking grass, in Central New York when it’s time for spring clean up. I wrote a second haiku this afternoon.
Outside, the ground is softening, studded with debris.
Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Mary Lee. Thank you for hosting! Be sure to stop by her excellent blog A(nother) Year of Reading.
It’s been a very sad and scary week in the news. At the end of this post, I will share a poem I wrote yesterday, to express my anger and frustration about unrestricted gun rights. By definition it has mean the erosion of safety and freedom for all who live in America.
But first, a celebration in the form of a lovely new picture book:
JUSTICE RISING: 12 Amazing Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement, by Katheryn Russell-Brown is hot off the press for 2023. Published by Viking, it begins by telling the readers that black women were “the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement.” It then goes on to prove it with short narratives of twelve “Sheroes” who organized, registered voters, wrote music and fueled the Movement.
SAY THEIR NAMES
1. Ella Baker
2. Ruby Bridges
3. Claudette Colvin
4. Dorothy Cotton
5. Fannie Lou Hamer
6. Correta Scott King
7. Diane Nash
8. Rosa Parks
9. Bernice Johnson Reagon
10. Gloria Richardson
11. Jo Ann Robinson
12. Sheyann Webb
13. Freedom Marchers
There were several on this list who I hadn’t learned about, such as JO ANN ROBINSON (1912-1992). Maybe some readers here haven’t either. Her story began one day in Montgomery, Alabama when Jo Ann was kicked off a bus for not sitting in the back. She fought back. A year later, she led the Women’s Political Council to fight for changes in unfair bus seating rules. Later, when Rosa Parks in 1955, she led her group to print flyers to encourage Black people to stop riding busses, and begin the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
All the narratives of the “sheroes” in this book are concise, easy for young children to read and understand and are all accompanied by colorful and engaging illustrations by Kim Holt.
One of the narratives tells the story of Ruby Bridges, who was the first black child, flanked by men with badges, to integrate a school in Louisiana. Her story is the subject of a Disney Movie. Unfortunately, some parents in Florida have decided that learning about her bravery will make white kids feel bad, so this week, have banned the movie in a school. Some white children will not have the chance to be inspired by her bravery and learn how one child stood up for herself. They might need that bravery themselves someday.
I will end with something political and I debated whether to share my thoughts on this blog. It’s hard not to be political because it seems politicians hold our children’s fate in their hands.
When I worked as a doctor in and ER we had a trauma room. We saw mostly car accidents in that room in the 1980’s in Syracuse. Rarely gun shot wounds. Today the incidence of gun violence, including suicides, are more numerous and more lethal everywhere.
With unlimited gun rights, there will be unstoppable injury and murder. Gun owners are not a monolith of responsible behavior, as some gun advocates seem to imply.
Strangely, I don’t see in the midst of the horror, the outrage in gun rights advocates or a fervent desire to keep children safe. All I can come up with is that the status quo serves them. These injured innocents serve a purpose.
Gun advocates know that in order to have unrestricted gun rights, innocent lives are the price. Homicide and suicide are unavoidable in a country of four hundred million guns. This week, a dispassionate Congressman from Nashville at the scene of a school shooting stated that Congress isn’t going to fix this problem. He spoke as if the were discussing pesky pot holes in the streets.
Thanks you if you read my grief inspired poem. Thank you, Mary Lee, for hosting. The good news is that the sun shone in Syracuse, like a beam of hope. I remain optimistic, like a lost cat that knows it will somehow, someway, find its way home.
Welcome to Poetry Friday! We are hosted this week by Rose at Imagine the Possibilities HERE. Thank you for hosting, Rose!
While browsing at my local library, I found this brand new and inspiring gem: WE ARE YOUR CHILDREN TOO: Black students, white supremacists, and the battle for Americas’s schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia. This middle grade book was published in 2023 by Simon and Schuster.
The author, P. O’Connell Pearson, is a former history teacher and a children’s writer. Readers will find the stories of so many everyday Americans, black children and parents, who risked their lives to fight for a public education.
The first person we learn about is sixteen year old Barbara Johns of Farmville, VA:
" . . . during the fall of 1950, Barbara was thinking about one thing in particular. . . .When would something be done about her school--Robert Russa Moton High School in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia?
Her high school was cold and wet inside. There was no gym, cafeteria, and the school built for 180 students held nearly 500. The chairs and blackboards were worn out, the books outdated. The high school for white kids was just the opposite. Barbara Johns decided to organize a strike.
The author brought the time and place to life. I read the 238 pages in one day.
The author shares a great deal of African American history. But the story centers around this:
When the Supreme Court decided in 1954, with Brown V. Board of Education, that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, The government of Prince Edward County, VA, decided to get rid of public schools altogether.
Outside the Supreme Court. Signs show white fears: RACE MIXING.
In 1959 funds were completely denied for their public schools. Public schools shuttered for five years. Most white kids, however, were able to be educated. Those who could afford it would attend a private white-only schools.
It was a dark difficult time for black children. To get an education, some were able to leave home, as young as five, to live with relatives, friends, or any other county they could find a school. The separations are heart wrenching. For those who couldn’t find a school, those five years took a huge toll in learning and future opportunity. There was a great deal of suffering. Many good people, white and black, who stepped up to help the community get through this time.
Eventually the Supreme Court stepped in again. In May 1964, it ruled that the county schools had to reopen that September. The community would struggle for years to establish schools and catch up.
I hope kids and parents will read this book. It will help them put into historical context what they are hearing and seeing today.
Barbara Johns’ old damp wet, school is now the Robert Russa Moton Museum in Farmville, VA. I’d like to visit and learn more about here and other heroes. Outside the museum is a marker about Barbara and the strike she organized in 1951. After reading the marker, one student was heard saying, “You never think that you can do something—but we did!”
Thanks for reading. It was fifty degrees today in Central New York. Spring is coming. It did rain but . . . whatever. Thank you Rose, for hosting.
Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Laura Purdie Salas Here. Thank you, Laura, for hosting.
I love watching the season transform. I’m sure I’m not alone. So, I appreciated the Poetry Sisters inviting all of us to write a poem this month, an etheree, on their ongoing theme for 2023, of transformation.
Who are the Poetry Sister’s? Find their names Here on a post by Mary Lee Hahn.
What is the poetry form called “ethheree?” This link has the info in case you aren’t familiar or you’d like a review.
Winter rallied, like a dying diva at the end of an opera, and re-established it’s hold on Central New York this week with the recent nor’easter storm on 3/14/23.
Central New York, outside my door 3/14/23, quiet and still.
But spring IS coming, because it’s what happens slowly in March in Central New York.
The day following the storm, March 15, winter seemed to be tip-toeing away as if it could escape notice.
March 15, 2023, the sound of dripping trees outside.
The change of season and nature is a popular topic for poets, as one would expect. I opened THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS and discovered this short lovely poem.
LOCUST TREE IN FLOWER
By William Carlos Williams 1935
Among
of
green
stiff
old
bright
broken
branch
come
white
sweet
May
again.
I think the word “again” at the end adds great impact. It does, it seems, because it underlies the miracle of the natural cycles here on earth. Spring happens again and again. The old and stiff branch bears flowers again.
Thank you for hosting, Laura Purdie Salas. Happy Spring!
Welcome to Poetry Friday this week hosted by Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe. Thank you, Heidi for hosting.
I’ve been rereading Roald Dahl’s novel, Matilda, today and thinking about how several of his books have apparently been re-written to make the language more polite. I don’t think novels should be rewritten and I’m not the only one. Salmon Rushdie apparently agrees and wrote on twitter, “Roald Dahl is no angel but this is absurd censorship.” We should be able to look back and learn from the classics as a reflection of the time in which they were written. We can learn where we came from, in my opinion.
I LOVE Roald Dahl’s books and I think Matilda is brilliant and one of the funniest books I have ever read.
I can relate to this little girl because I discovered reading through librarians and a school teacher. Parents when I grew up were busy working and hands off in the reading department. They were happy to let teachers teach.
Matilda had worse problems. She had mean parents, but that’s what I love about Dahl, his use of exaggeration is a huge part of his humor. Matilda’s parents were the worst parents imaginable and blind to Matilda’s also exaggerated and brilliant intellectual life.
But Matilda survives her parents idiocy, the TV dinners her mother serves every night after bingo by the television, and her father’s self importance and constant lies. She survives by playing tricks on them, hilarious tricks that her parents never catch on to, like putting hair bleach in her father’s hair dressing and glue in his hat. They deserve every trick!
Matilda, for me, is a celebration of children, teachers and librarians and the magic of school and how it helps young people learn to think for themselves.
So it has discouraged me lately to see the discord and disrespect on TV at school board meetings. Are we simply to assume that all parents know more about education and books than teachers and librarians?
So here’s a limerick for Matilda, who survives her nasty parents and saved, actually adopted, by her teacher:
Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Tanita Here. Thank you, Tanita, for hosting.
Laura Shovan’s February Poetry Project is over and I almost managed to write a poem everyday except, I think, two. Still I am very proud I managed to write while and visit relatives most of February. So Yay! And it was wonderful reading so many different responses to daily prompts.
Today I will share another of the poems I started this month. I can’t recall the prompt, but I chose to celebrate the nose and how it aids the human race.
But I am hardly the only poet to celebrate the nose. Below are two stanzas from a poem by Jack Prelutsky, who is glad the nose is where it is on the face and not elsewhere:
BE GLAD YOUR NOSE IS ON YOUR FACE
by Jack Prelutsky
Be glad your nose is on your face,
not pasted on some other place,
for if it were where it is not,
you might dislike your nose a lot.
Imagine if your precious nose
were sandwiched in between your toes,
that clearly would not be a treat,
for you'd be forced to smell your feet.
The rest of the poem can be read HERE
My poem expresses gratitude for the nose differently:
It’s interesting, I think, to consider all the things the different parts of our healthy bodies do for us and they all deserve a poem or two.
Of course we can’t sit around all day contemplating the human body, we’re too busy doing what we do! But we can still be grateful, now and again, for this collection of miracles.
Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Tabatha Yeatts Here. Thank you for hosting. I know that Tabatha has been busy along with about forty other poets, including myself. We’re part of Laura Shovan’s February Poetry Project on Facebook. It’s been fun writing to a prompt every day.
I have been in San Antonio visiting my sister who I haven’t seen in at least two years. It’s been wonderful to see her. One of the highlights were homemade the tortillas we bought in a local grocery story. But there is more to do here than eat.
Today we drove down to the Alamo.
Outside the Alamo
I read on a plaque:
“The limestone walls of the Alamo church are roughly 4 feet thick on average. Inside these sturdy walls the Texans positioned three cannons atop a 12-foot high elevated platform of earth and wood. . . . It was here that some of the final fighting of the Battle of the Alamo took place. According to an eyewitness, the last of the defenders continued to resist the Mexican Army from the “pitch dark” end of the Church.”
Inside the Alamo
I have a lot of studying to do to get up to speed on the history. It’s complicated. But I gathered some background: that during the early 1800’s the settlers/immigrants who had come from all over the U.S and world to make a living in San Antonio, which at the time was part of Mexico, had serious disagreements with the Mexican government. This church was the settler’s staging ground in their fight against Mexican forces.
Heroes who fought in the Battle of the Alamo
And where there is war, there are heroes and tributes to them. This is my sister on the lower left catching a picture of them.
There is so much I’d like to learn about Texas, and I hope to learn more. This part of the world is so different from where I live in Syracuse, NY, where it snowed this week. The temperature has been in the 80’s here this week.
To change gears, I leave you with two poems I wrote this week. I hope you like them. The first is about an old rundown house.
Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Carol at Beyond Literacy. Make sure you stop buy and see what poetry she is sharing today. Thank you, Carol for hosting.
Would you like to know more about Poetry Friday? Look HERE.
Laura Shovan’s February Facebook Poetry Project is in full swing and the group, including me, are spending a lot of time writing new poems! The emersion has been lots of fun.
I picked up this book this week, by Richard H. Thaler, an economist, and Cass R. Sunstein, a social scientist. I’m sure many readers here have heard of NUDGE. I’ve been reading the new, and final, edition.
Since women’s rights in Iran have been in the news lately, I’ll mention a study I read of in this book about women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, in a chapter entitled “Following the Herd.”
As many people know, in Saudia Arabia women in the past have been subject to a custom called “guardianship,” where women can work outside the home only if their husbands allow it. I had always assumed that most men in that country supported guardianship. But assumptions can be tested.
A researcher named Leonardo Bursztyn decided to actually study if young husbands in that country supported the guardianship custom.
A woman at work in an office
THE STUDY:
The researchers interviewed a group of young husbands in Saudia Arabia and asked them whether or not it was right for women to participate in the labor force.
He learned that the overwhelming majority of young husbands answered, “yes.”
Then, Bursztyn divided the same group of husbands in half and revealed the results of his study to half of the men.
Four months later, the wives of the men who had received the information about the majority of other men’s beliefs, that it’s OK for women to work, were applying and interviewing for jobs. The men had changed their views after finding out the views of other men.
Here’s the bottom line they discovered about social norms:
” . . . if people wrongly think that most people are committed to a long standing social norm, a small nudge correcting that misperception can inaugurate large-scale change.” (NUDGE P. 82)
In this book, I also I learned that if you want to nudge people to do the right thing, for instance, to vote, or use a towel more than once, or even pay their taxes, it’s helpful to use peer pressure. People will often do things because they know others LIKE THEM are doing it. Here’s a short poem inspired by the possibility of getting more young people to vote.
Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Laura Shovan on her blog Here. Thank you for hosting, Laura!
This month I’m participating in Laura’s 11th February Poetry Project on Facebook, for the first time. So glad there was a spot left. I was a little nervous anticipating the first prompt to appear on the screen, but it’s been fun. It will keep me writing everyday, reading others’ work, and I know I will discover new ideas and poems.
THE BROOK IN FEBRUARY
by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
A snowy path for squirrel and fox,
It winds between the wintry firs.
Snow-muffled are its iron rocks,
And o'er its stillness nothing stirs.
But low, bend low a listening ear!
Beneath the mask of moveless white
A babbling whisper you shall hear—
Of birds and blossoms, leaves and light.
And, thinking that each month has something good to offer, I wrote this:
Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Marcie’s blog, Here. Thank you for hosting. Make sure to stop by to check out what she has for us this week.
Each morning, after I hear what is going on in the world, I try not to dwell on the news, for obvious reasons, and just try to be a good citizen.
I’ve been reading novels lately. ( I just read FAMILY LIFE, a 2014 novel by Akhil Sharma which was fabulous, about a young boy in an immigrant family from India and their life in the U.S. It’s a sad story but a page turner, the writing poetic.) I linked the New York Times Review.
So what can I share this week, poetry wise?
Sometimes in the evening I watch the British Baking Show, hosted by Paul Hollywood, of course. I imagine being a contestant. I am sure I would be sent home by the judges the first day of the ten day competition.
I wrote a triolet last week and described the form. So this week, for fun, I honed my craft further with another one.
BRITISH BAKING DREAMS
Today I watched the Baking Show-- the judges mostly kind. Who knew that salt makes yeast grow slow! Today I watched the Baking Show. What is it like to overproof the dough, then stand and feel maligned? I watched the British Baking Show, the judges mostly kind.
