San Francisco and Coit Tower

Welcome to Poetry Friday! Today we are hosted by Patricia Franz on her blog Reverie, which is HERE. Thank you, Patricia for hosting. I look forward to reading your blog and others this week.

I have not been posting regularly because of travel to see my grandson in Pacifica, California. I just returned after three weeks and have too many things I’d like to share. I have been planning to go to a certain site for a while, but last week I finally made it to Coit Tower in San Francisco.

Coit tower was built in 1933 with money bequeathed by Lillie Hitchcock Coit to be used to build the tower as well as a monument that would celebrate San Francisco’s fire fighters. As a young girl she was rescued from a burning building and her life saved by fire fighters. She never forgot it. If you like, see a photo and read more about it Here.

After the tower was built, In 1934 a group of artists employed by the Public Works and Art Project, a precursor to the Works Progress Administration (WPA), filled its walls with murals. They depict Americans doing all kinds of work and living diverse lives. The murals are inspiring, a celebration of workers during the Great Depression.

Part of a mural named FARMER by Clifford Wright (1900-1996)

Part of a mural of industries of California by Ralph Stackpole. These women are canning.

A small part of the mural LIBRARY by Bernard Zakheim (1896-1985) Libraries were an important part of life in the early 20th century.

There was too much for me to take in! There was too much to see. These pictures are a small part.

And this is the view of San Francisco Bay from the top of Coit Tower. Treasure Island and Yerba Buena island are in the distance.

My trip wasn’t all sight seeing, we spent a lot of time with baby Tommy. But would like to report that San Francisco was peaceful, beautiful, and a welcoming place even if it’s a little foggy.

San Francisco Fog

Thick grey fog layers
on ocean, beaches, bridges--
so you feel your way.

©Janice Scully 2025

Halloween is next week and I’m heading to Poetry Palooza at Highlights. It’s been a while since I’ve hung out with a large group of writers, except, of course, on Poetry Friday. Happy Halloween!

A Rictameter and a Changing World

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by the amazing Amy Ludwig Vanderwater Here at The Poem Farm. Thank you, Amy, for hosting! I look forward to what you are sharing this week.

School starting in September is a time when children learn about change, learn to look forward to it. New friends, new books. But as I wrote this short poem, the one below, about change, I realized that I’ve imbued it with my current adult feelings about change, about current change all around us that isn’t normal. Leaves turning took on a deeper meaning. So maybe my poem is a little melodramatic. I can’t tell.

The RICTAMETER, a form that I heard about on Poetry Friday. It is a poem of nine lines with the syllable pattern:2-4-6-8-10-8-6-4-2. The first and the last lines are the same.

TO MY SUMMER FRIEND

Leaves turned. 
From green to red, 
rattled in the blue sky, 
broadcasted: fall is on the way.

I shiver and run to catch the school bus,
thinking of our summer hide out, 
sharing books under trees,
laughing before
leaves turned. 

© Janice Scully 2025

A tree painting exercise I recently did. I have a great respect for those who paint trees that are realistic. That will definitely take a while.

Real trees at Green Lakes State Park in Upstate New York. There are scattered benches and it might be a nice place to read on a summer day.

Have a happy Poetry Friday,

Back to School Golden Shovel

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted hosted by poet Rose Capelli HERE. Thank you, Rose, for hosting. I look forward to what you share. Also I wish all teachers and librarians the best as they begin a new year of teaching. And so are students.

Last week on my neighborhood walk, I passed our local high school and found messages in chalk on the sidewalk. School started this week. These words expresses the hope that beginnings are about, that anyone who has ever begun something, or loved a clean slate, understands. I thought it would be a good phrase for a golden shovel poem.


A NEW SCHOOL YEAR 


Everyone hopes for this:

that we might will

this year to be

an unusual one. The

year when the best

of us is revealed and seen. A year

that we might remember forever.


©Janice Scully 2025

As I wrote this I thought of my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Belsten, who saw, I believed, the best in me and encouraged me to read and read.

We could all use a boost of hope given all the worries adults and kids might be sharing this September.

I missed Poetry Friday last week. I’ve catching up with routine appointments that I put off all summer and attending a family wedding, etc. . But I have taken the time here and there to practice painting watercolor birds. I am a total beginner but I have enjoyed these simple exercises. It does give my mind a mini-vacation when I sit and think only of a bird, or the color of feathers.

Chicken, of course.

This hummingbird illustrated what can happen if you paint close to a flower I didn’t let dry enough. I love the colors. Is there a hummingbird that looks like this? I have no idea.

Have a great weekend and I hope you have some lovely fall weather to enjoy, like I do here in Upstate NY. Thank you, Rose, for hosting!

Each State Brings Something Different, for Example, Wisconsin and Minnesota

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by writer Karen Edmisten Here. Thank you Karen for Hosting. Karen shares with me a deep love of coffee.

I am happy to say I submitted a poem to the Gyroscope Review this week. It made me feel good to participate. Submissions are open until September 1st, if you happen to be a poet and a woman over fifty.

I have spent a lot of time this week watching YouTube videos on watercolor. I find it all fascinating and isn’t creativity good for one’s mental health? It’s good for mine.

But today I’d like to celebrate our fifty states. Why? Because they are all different and anyone who disparages diversity might reconsider if they knew more about the individual states.

Looking through my phone for photos to paint, I found photos from my drive out west with my husband two years ago. Bart and I rode through a state I’d never been to : Wisconsin was one. Like most states, its citizenry is made up of native peoples and those with immigrant backgrounds. We visited the beautiful capital, Madison.

Wisconsin State House

We also drove through Minnesota. The town of Blue Earth, Minnesota, is the home the Jolly Green Giant, celebrated by a very tall statue. Who knew? He looked oddly like my husband.

I learned facts about Wisconsin on a road sign.

Minnesota facts: There are fifteen thousand lakes in Wisconsin, 65 towns with the word “lake” in them and many more in the Chippewa or Dakota languages. There are 13 falls. The one called Minnehaha inspired the Song of Hiawatha, by Longfellow. There are ten rivers and five rapids, not to mention isles, bays, and beaches. I was very impressed! There are many more facts and I’d like to return. What an amazing state!

I love New York and my home in the Finger Lakes region as much as those from Wisconsin and Minnesota love their states’ beauty.

Last week at the New York State Fair, I visited prize livestock, chicken and rabbits. I met a farmer who told me that a calf gains two pounds a day and eats grains two days after birth. A year old calf I met, weighed two hundred pounds! I loved hearing about his life as a dairy farmer.

Calves at the New York State Fair

If we can see the beauty and understand the history and people in each state, that can only help build respect for our differences. Is that too preachy? 

ABOUT OUR FIFTY STATES

Each one different
in origen and people,
every state belongs

© Janice Scully 2025

Thank you, Karen, for hosting!

A Picture, Stolen, and a Poem

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by the wonderful and talented Heidi Mordhorst HERE. I look forward to seeing what she will be sharing with us. This week felt like a good week to keep busy doing things that bring you joy.. I am cherishing my principals in the light of the Smithsonian news and so much else, and try my best to be kind to others. It’s hard to fathom the kind of people who would remove Harriet Tubman’s prayer book from the Museum of African American History.

I sat on my porch earlier this week. It was about 90 degrees and I was looking for a poem. I found this and drew this picture:

.

THE BRINK

My pen is heavy, full of ink,
while on a shady porch I think.
Ice in my coffee melts and clinks,
and a poem peeks across the brink. 

Janice Scully 2025

For some reason I was trying to write a quatrain with the end of each line rhyming. Something fun, trying to create images.

I mentioned I love the work of Wayne Thiebaud. In the book WAYNE THIEBAUD: Art Comes From Art, published by the the De Young and Legion of Honor fine arts museums in San Francisco. He painted with oil. I found this painting entitled “Coffee” from 1961:

So I painted a small watercolor copy which didn’t turn out well but tried again, remembering to wet my paper first, which I’d forgotten to do on my first try.

But I liked my second try:

I’ve feeling a bit on the brink, and finding even a small poem helps me feel more positive.

Thanks for this place of community. Have a great weekend! Thank you, Heidi!

Langston Hughes poem/Sealey Challenge

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone. Molly is a teacher, and last week she shared a charming interaction she had at a Staples store with a boy who was soon to enter kindergarten. He expressed in an adorable way the excitement and uncertainty about this new beginning. The end of Summer is an exiting time of year for many.

This week I decided to participate in the Sealey challenge. I wanted to make a commitment that I could actually keep, and I pulled this book off my shelf: 100 Poems To Break Your Heart by Edward Hirsch.

As we all know, poems have layers of meaning. Hirsh has chosen 100 poems, great poems old and new, and in two or three pages tells us the history of the poem and the author’s craft. I am reading at least one a day. Today I read this poem written in 1927 by Langston Hughes, about a time many Americans want to forget: the Jim Crow era.

history:

SONG FOR A DARK GIRL
by Langston Hughes

Way Down South in Dixie
     (Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
     To a cross roads tree.

Way Down South in Dixie
     (Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
     What was the use of prayer.

Way Down South in Dixie
     (Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
     On a gnarled and naked tree.

This is a short poem, three quatrains. The language is direct but complex in terms of meaning. I’ll mention some of what I learned. First “Way Down South in Dixie” refers to a popular song from the segregated South. We all know this song. It was written to be song by someone in black face who, playing a slave, longs for a return to the South that is so dear to him. This is placed in contrast to the reality of lynching, in a place and time of cruelty that few black folks would long to return to. The song was propaganda..

Also in contrast are the phrases “black young lover”in the first stanza and “White lord Jesus,” in the second. What god, white or otherwise, worthy of worship would allow lynching to happen, and is this white god or the young black lover, more worthy of praise?

Anyone reading this poem will understand, if they didn’t quite before, why book banning and revision of history is taking place in America. Our true history, involving such crimes as slavery and lynching, and the hijacking of Christianity, are all true, facts to remember, as teachers and librarians understand.

I look forward to exploring more of the poems in this Hirsch’s book.

On a different note, more I can share this week. First, I have been trying out water color painting. It’s fun to try and I’ve found some books to get me started.

I love the painter Wayne Thiebaud, who painted cupcakes and gum ball machines among many other things. This spring I saw a Thiebaud exhibit at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. He wrote about being a thief, an artist stealing ideas from other artists. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I painted a donut as he might. In a book entitled, WATERCOLOR: Success in Four Steps, by Marina Bakasova, I found instructions on how to draw a donut.

It’s not hard to paint pastries or veggies, it just requires some patience. Faces and landscapes, well, that takes more study. Still it was fun sending this postcard to my sister.

I also happened upon and snapped a picture of a red tailed hawk this week, in a grassy area, enjoying a tasty catch.

I think I’ll try to draw him soon. Not sure about drawing feathers but will try. His tail was a deep and bright brick red. He was gorgeous and let me watch him for a while.

Red Tailed Hawk

Enjoy the rest of summer. Thank you Molly Hogan for hosting! Best wishes to all those returning to school classrooms and libraries soon..

“Hissing” in the Yard

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted my the talented Marcie Atkins Herehttps://www.marcieatkins.com.

Salt City Verse still exists!

I have been away for a while, my life has been busy with many good things. In May my husband, Bart, and I were in San Francisco visiting our new grandson, Tommy, who is now already seven months old! We stayed through June.

He’s a miracle to us. He can turn over and grab things and hold on with his strong little hands. He laughs and eats. We are home now in New York State and his other grandparents are visiting him and we wait for the daily videos that tell us what they are up to on the West Coast.

But it’s nice to be home back to Upstate New York warm weather, and my books and friends. I hope to be writing more regularly. Also, inspired by many on Poetry Friday, I have been trying to paint with water colors and have found some YouTube videos to help me. It’s really fun!

As many do, I love to listen to the cicadas hiding out in the trees on warm summer evenings. The sound surrounded me this Wednesday evening.

Like in the Song “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” by Joni Mitchell, cicadas hiss, don’t they? You can find her song, one of my favorites, on YouTube. For some reason I had difficulty embedding the video here. Sorry.

Anyway, it was an incredibly loud the sound! I happened to be searching for something to inspire a poem and surrounded as I was, this tanka came to mind.

SUMMER EVENING IN UPSTATE NEW YORK 

Cicadas hissing.
My yard a colosseum of trees.
I could be in Rome;
but no amphitheater,
stars the only scheduled show.

©Janice Scully 2025

The Colosseum in Rome

The Hollywood Bowl, I suppose, could have come to mind as it is a huge space full of sound. But wherever I imagined myself, the cicadas, like many natural events, transported me.

I look forward to reading your poems this weekend. Thank you, Marcie, for hosting.

FOUND IN A LITTLE LIBRARY: Ukrainian Story of Hope by Patricia Polacco

Welcome to Poetry Friday! This week we are hosted by poet Buffy Silverman, Here. Thank you Buffy! I always look forward to your posts.

I’ve been with my new grandson watching as he tries to roll over. At six months, he coos and sometimes sounds like a parrot! He’s always listening and watching.

Since the Ukranian fight of sovereignty has continued and they are fighting valiantly, I want to celebrate the Ukranian people with a children’s picture book author with Ukranian roots, Patricia Polacco. Now, I know that the teachers and librarians that follow Poetry Friday are familiar with her. But I was reminded of her this week .

On my daily walks in Pacifica, CA, I visit a little library on the walking path. One day, it contained four picture books signed by Patricia Polacco, which I thought were treasures. I took two. She has written more than 77 books, many inspired by her Ukranian grandmother. Here is Polacco’s author website. On this website is a fascinating u-tube video of one of her author visits where she talks about her family and storytelling. It was really delightful to watch.

.

Today I’ll share her picture book Rechenkas’s Eggs. Polacco is an author and illustrator. I love her artwork.

Her signature from 2008

The main character is not a child, but an old Russian lady, Babushka,who paints eggs and every year wins first prize at the Easter Festival in Moskva.

One day after it snowed, she meets a heard of caribou, hungry because the grass they eat is covered with snow. Babushka believes it a miracle that they have found her. But while she if feeding them a flock of geese fly by. One goose falls from the sky, shot by a hunter! :

Fortunately, the goose isn’t dead. Babushka rehabilitates the injured goose back to health, though in the process the goose accidentally wrecks Babuska’s art table, her paints as well as the eggs that Babushka has carefully painted.

It’s a disaster!

But as the injured goose recover from her wound, she leaves in her basket beautiful painted eggs . Babushka kindness is repaid with daily beautiful eggs, enough for her to again win at the egg festival.

While Babushka is off to the festival, the goose, now healed, leaves and returns to its flock. And there is a surprise ending: the goose has left another painted egg that hatches. The little baby goose remains forever with Babushka.

So, in this book we find healing after violence. Babushka recovers from her losses and there is hope for the future.

I have found a number of old poetry books for kids in the Little Library. I found a poem to share in one entitled, POEMS CHILDREN WILL SIT STILL FOR: A SELECTION FOR THE PRIMARY GRADES, Citation Press, New York, 1969. The poem is by William Butler Yeats.

I find it is moving and relates to the rest of the post, maybe because of the gun threat, but the fear in this poem is unfounded. According to the book, the word KYLE-NA-NO is Irish and refers to an unknown place: a narrow inlet of the sea of old.

TO A SQUIRREL AT KYLE-NA-NO
by William Butler Yeats

Come play with me.
Why should you run
Through the shaking tree
As though I'd a gun
to strike you dead? 
When all I would do 
Is to scratch your head
And let you go.

The Pacifica ground squirrel, is noted for their lack of a bushy tail, and living in burrows in the ground.

I hope everyone has a great weekend and thanks, Buffy, for hosting Poetry Friday.

Little Sails on the Beach

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Ramona at Pleasures at the page Here. Thank you, Ramona, for hosting this week. Be sure to stop by and see what poetry magic she has for us this week.

It isn’t that often that I take a walk and see a complete mystery, something that I have never seen before, like I did yesterday. I’m still staying with my son and his family in Pacifica, CA and walking on the beach I saw thousands of small white objects littering the sand that were not there the day before:

I picked one up and it felt dry and weightless as a potato chip. It was probably salty too, given its location.

Here are two specimens:

What are they?

Closer to the water I found this. It was roughly the same shape but plump, not dried out like the above two.

Velella Valella, a genus of the class Hydrozoa

These little sea creatures are related to the Portuguese Man-of War. They are called “sea rafts” “by-the -wind-sailor”, “purple sail, ” or “little sail.” Their more scientific name is Velella Velella, the genus and species. The class is Hydrozoa. If you want to learn more, the link will take you to Wikipedia.

The bottom part of this creature, the sailboat part, is often blue, but the one I found was colorless, translucent. They have a small stiff sail at a right angle that catches the wind and moves them across the water like sailboats. According to wikipedia, “Under certain wind conditions that may be stranded by the thousand on beaches.”

Today was my lucky day to learn about sea rafts! 

A SURPRISE ON MY BEACH WALK

So today without my knowin'
I stumbled on a Hydrozoan!

A creature with a sailor's mind,
a ready sail, but blowing blind!

With thousands stranded on the shore
if the wind continues, many more.

Nature hides behind a door
with countless mysteries in store,

and so today without my knowin',
I stumbled on a hydrozoan. 


© Janice Scully 2025




One of the fun things I’ve discovered on my walks is a little library. It sits on a pole by the walking trail. I have donated some books and discovered books I would never have read before. You never know what you will find. Today I found Hop on Pop for my grandson.

I found the book I’m reading now, “Isaac’s Storm” by Erik Larson. I’ve read his “Devil in the White City” which I loved and this one about the deadliest hurricane in history, 1900, in Galveston TX, when the National Weather Service was in it’s infancy. I look forward to more of Larson’s suspenseful writing. I bought “Rough Sleepers” by Tracy Kidder about a doctor helping to house and treat the homeless in Boston over the last thirty or more years. I donated it to the little library and hope someone else likes it as much as I did.

Have a great week. Thank you, Ramona, for hosting!

Paragliding over the Pacific

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Sarah Grace Tuttle Here. Thank you, Sarah, for hosting!

I am visiting my new grandson, Tommy, having left the beginning of summer in Central New York for the breezy, cool and foggy climate of Northern California. He is three months old and it’s a delight to see what he’s up to. He’s found his mouth with his hand, moving his limbs, watching us. He likes the boardbook, Chicken Soup With Rice, and I swear he’s listening and watching the pictures.

Pacifica, CA, is a great place to walk, though windy and foggy. I don’t mind. Today, I saw a paraglider over the ocean. (read about paragliding here on Wikipedia) I caught this on my phone. The paraglider must be moving thirty forty miles an hour. When they take to the wind, the paraglider can fly, it looks to me, twenty feet or more above the water.


PARAGLIDER

To air gusts 
I alone confide

trusting only the wind
as I glide,

like a splayed seagull
twisting, sliding,

slicing the salt air
above the sea

escaping for a while
the tug
of gravity. 

©Janice Scully 2025

Of course, you can hire someone to take you up in a paraglider, riding tandem. No experience necessary. No thanks! I prefer watching and imagining it, but it must be quite thrilling and one of those experiences like sky diving for those keeping bucket lists.

I bought some colored pencils and paper to draw the wildflowers on Mori Point two miles away from where we are staying. I drew from this photo.

With the help of Youtube videos about colored pencil drawing, I tried to capture the mix of green, blue and yellow with the ocean in the background. I thought the wild flowers would last a while, but they were gone in a week. 

MORI POINT 5/1/25

Wildflowers bloom,
painting the hill in short strokes--
a brief impression.

My husband attended a demonstration to protest the private use of public lands. It was chilly and windy but many showed up and cars beeped. Hopefully we’ll make it to others. The attempts of some to steal our history from us is weighing on me, and so much more. It’s so disturbing! Here’s a picture. The use of public land to build golf courses or hotels, or to drill, will not be taken lightly.

Enjoy the weekend, everyone, and thank you, Sarah, for hosting!