Tag: Imperfect ll

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

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!