Mostly Poetry for Children
Haiku master Issa (1762-1826) wrote this:
In crevice after crevice on the cliff face-- wild azaleas. by Issa
My haiku today is inspired by the above haiku by Issa and this California photo:
December, Santa Cruz.
Scattered on ledges and lulled by the sea-- cormorants. © Janice Scully
Happy Easter and National Poetry Month!
California Dreaming?
Several songs come to mind at the Santa Cruz Pier.
Santa Cruz Pier The Pacific swirls and roars. Seals sleep, well fed, exhausted, under the boardwalk. © Janice Scully 2023
Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Margaret Simon on her blog Reflections on the Teche, Here. What is Poetry Friday? Find out HERE.
On her blog, Margaret will be posting the next line of the Poetry Friday PROGRESSIVE POEM, now in delightful full swing. Thank you for hosting!
Many individual poets celebrating National Poetry Month. For example, I am posting a new haiku a day and today that will be #7.
To find out which poets are doing what on Poetry Friday during National Poetry Month, click HERE. You will find a round up of NPM blog events on Jama’s blog, Jama’s Alphabet Soup.
As I thought about the haiku for this post, I remembered this is the week when Cherry Blossoms bloom in Washington D.C. I thought they were breathtaking to look out when I lived there. The trees were a gift in 1912 from Japan to the United States. More about this interesting history HERE.
This picture gives you an idea, only a rough feel for what it’s like to walk among so many cherry blossoms.
Spring in Washington D.C. April visitors— pink clouds of cherry blossoms in sky and water. © Janice Scully 2023
Happy National Poetry Month!
San Francisco December 11, 2022
Hungry pelicans hunt fish, turtles, and tadpoles-- coastal water fest. © Janice Scully 2022
Details outside my window:
4/5/23 7AM A gray house through trees, obscured by brown mottled trunks-- a crow darting past. © Janice Scully 2023
The daffodils in my yard are paused here, on the verge of a full-bore celebration of NPM.
4/4/23 8AM
daffodil chorus
in the cool splash-splash of rain
feet anchored in mud
© Janice Scully 2023
The return of birdsong marks spring mornings in Central New York.
I often hear the Cardinal. Click on this link to hear it, too.
4/3/23 it breaks the silence the sudden chirp of birdsong sun lights my window ©Janice Scully 2023
A gift from my neighbors: Home made maple syrup, almost gone.
4/2/23 sap flowing in trees drips and drops into buckets— a gift of sweetness. ©Janice Scully 2023
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.
4/1/23 8AM pine cones in April half stuck in thick brown wet mud— snubs springtime clean-up ©Janice Scully 2023 Draft
4/1/4PM sudden wind, trees shake, sunny skies switch to grey— such a foolish day! Janice Scully 2023 Draft
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.
This state of affairs inspired this:
WHAT WE OWE TO SMALL AMERICANS. Nine year olds huddled under desks, or dashing outside, to the rat tat tat of bullets, or bleeding on linoleum near the art room along with teachers janitors, and principals are paying the price of our twisted freedom, along with the parents of kids at Sandy Hook and Nashville, and Tops and Walmart shoppers, living as if their lives weren’t about to end in the coffee aisle or meat department. Will anyone dare face the injured and dead and, besides thoughts and prayers, say, "Thank you for your service?" © Janice Scully 2023 (draft)
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.