Welcome to Poetry Friday. If you don’t know what Poetry Friday is, learn more about it here at Renee LaTulippe’s fabulous poetry website, No Water River.
This week our host is the talented Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche. Please check in there to find out what she has in store for poets this week.
Let me say up front that I have been overwhelmed for a while by the feelings engendered by the phrase “While Nero fiddled, Rome burned.”
It just seems that as there is so much our country should be doing now to solve real problems, yet leaders fight and waste time and money.
However:
Yesterday I found some fun topics to think about. On Wednesday evening on the PBS show, “Animals with Cameras,” tiny cameras that weigh 5% of a meerkat’s body weight, were placed around the necks of meerkats. These clever engineers scurried off to reveal their burrows four feet underground, like a dense subway system.
The cameras revealed a birthing room with five infant meerkats, eyes still closed, actively rooting around for mother’s milk. (I don’t have a picture but you can watch the show.) Apparently this had never been seen before, the babies’ level of activity was a surprise to the researchers. These creatures made me smile. Thank you PBS.
I also leaned on NOVA why planets and moons are spheres–Gravity of course. It inspired this.
PLANETARY QUESTION All planets and moons must become spheres. Gravity softens all angles. Does roundness help planets hurl faster through space and why orbits never get tangled? © Janice Scully 2020 (draft)
Fortunately this week I’ve felt some progress as I try to write a novel in verse inspired by my brother’s Vietnam letters. I hope to have a first draft done, the story down soon, in time to share some of them in a workshop I’m taking with Georgia Heard next month.
Don’t forget to check out what Margaret Simon is up to this Friday at Reflection on the Teche.