Tag: Holidays

Elfchen poems

Welcome to Poetry Friday on this last Friday of the year. Thank you Michelle Kogan for hosting! Check in with her Here.

I was away last week visiting family. I hope everyone had a joyful holiday. Since our return, my husband feels under the weather. He’s OK, and so far is so far Covid negative but who knows? I’ve noticed that friends here and there are getting covid, though no one is very sick.

Let’s move on to elfchen poems.

This week I will contribute a few. The form is described Here. It’s a short five line poem and the directions made me think:

First line one word: A thought, object, a color, smell or the like.

Second line two words: What does the word from the first line do?

Third line three words: Where or how is the word from line one?

Fourth line four words: What do you mean?

Fifth line one word: What results? What is the conclusion?

I saw the most brilliant blue in the stained glass at the Sagrada Familia, a cathedral in Barcelona last year.

MEDITATION

blue
deep calm
colors evening skies
children will sleep tonight
peace

© Janice Scully (draft) 2023

Pumpkin pie with cinnamon.

PUMPKIN PIE

Cinnamon.
Holiday memory.
Ancient amygdala triggered.
Take a deep breath.
Delight.

© Janice Scully (draft) 2023

This lilac tree looks down for the count. 

DREAMING OF SPRING

Lilac,
playing dead.
Gray,cold December.
Fragrant purple flowers gone.
Deceiving. 

© Janice Scully (draft) 2023

I have one last one I wrote after listening to a radio story here on the show 1-A, about laboratory grown, cultivated, chicken. It is worth a listen. Cultivated meat is being tested in two restaurants, one in San Francisco and in Washington D.C. 

Chicken.
Lab grown.
No slaughter required.
Reportedly tastes the same.
Try?

©Janice Scully 2023

Since food production requiring slaughterhouses and the killing of animals contributes to 20% of green house emissions, it would be significant in the fight against global warming. I’d definitely try if it is ever available.

Well, as for the elfchen, I look forward to reading more. I found that most of my lines were end-stopped. I wasn’t sure to punctuate or not.

Happy New Year!

Carl Sandburg’s PHIZZOG

Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by the lovely talented poet, Irene Latham HERE. Make sure you stop by to see what Irene has for us this week.

Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Get your questions answered HERE.

Because it’s the holidays and I recently traveled, I found myself looking at too many pictures of me and deleting many. I thought of being human and our personal relationship to the ever present and ever changing face we each carry around.

There I was, smiling in front of ancient buildings, at a Thanksgiving party with relatives, posing with my son in California. It’s surprised me how much I look like both my parents. It’s difficult to describe, but a variety of emotions welled up.

I discovered Carl Sandburg wrote a poem that resonated. It was in this book, and the poem was originally published in 1930:

Early Moon, by Carl Sandburg

PHIZZOG
by Carl Sandburg

This face you got,
This here phizzog you carry around,
You never picked it out for yourself, at all, at all--did
     you?
This here phizzog--somebody handed it to you--am I 
     right?
Somebody said, "Here's yours, now go see what you can 
     do with it."
"No goods exchanged after
     being taken away"--
This face you got.

This poem is sweet and funny. No goods exchanged, indeed!

Happy Holidays to everyone!! Hopefully the arctic weather doesn’t preclude my family from traveling four hours to see my husband’s sister for Christmas. We’ll all take our phizzogs with us for photos and celebrate Christmas and the end of 2022. We are lucky we have the freedom to do so. God bless the people of Ukraine.






Carl Sandburg