Month: July 2023

Poetry Friday: Pool Time

Pools have been a constant in my life.

What a blessing, as a child, to spend nearly every summer day at the pool! (What amazing affordable daycare the pool provided!)

I remember with vivid details every pool in every city in every phase of my life. There was even a (very brief) time when I was an open water swimmer, and I remember those two lakes, as well.

I no longer swim a mile with confident, snappy flip turns, trying to beat my own record time. I’m in the phase where the gentle whole-body movement and the controlled breathing at a leisurely pace is all I need.

What a blessing, at this end of adulthood, to still have a pool in my life! (Although you can imagine my irritation yesterday when I got to the health club and the pool was closed because the pump was down…)

The Poetry Sisters wrote monotetras this month. Lots of rules about syllables and rhymes, but fun!

Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters came up with this month:
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas

Jan has this week’s Full-o-Links, dragonfly-hat edition BONANZA known as the Poetry Friday roundup at Bookseedstudio.

Poetry Friday: You Might Need to Hear This

It all started with play: building quilt blocks with black and white, then realizing that I have some solids that can add pops of color that echo the splatters in the black corners.

Knowing this little quilty thing I was making would eventually have an audience through photos on social media, I wanted it to do just a little bit more good in the world than simply “look at this pretty thing I made.” I wanted it to say something that someone might need to hear. I wrote in my notebook, “I will use my art and my words to put positive messages out to the world.”

No one knew about these quilt blocks and my intentions for them except for me and the Universe.

And then, on Facebook, a former student reached out with the kind of message that reminds a teacher (or anyone, really) that we have no idea of the long-term impact of our words and actions. She wrote (in part), “will you please make me one… so that i always have something to help inspire me and that anytime my faith starts to fall i can always have something that u made in front of me to make me realize… i can do it… (and believe me when i say i need that motivation more than ever right now)”

I was already making the quilt that she needs. With the words on it that she needs to hear and remember.

Goosebumps much? I had some.

Now excuse me while I get back to the sewing machine.

Linda Mitchell has today’s Poetry Friday Roundup at A Word Edgewise.

Poetry Friday: Grow Something Beautiful

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2023

This sudoku poem has a striking line in the left-most column: “Grow something beautiful from what might seem like dirt.” This is a quote from page 120 of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, by poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy.

Heidi gave the Inklings the challenge of writing sudoku poems after I shared one back in June, and I originally got the idea from Rattle. As best I can tell, these poems are meant to contain ten(ish) haiku(ish) poems within the grid, five in the columns and five in the rows. They are fun to write, but take a good amount of fiddling.

Here’s what the other Inklings came up with this month:

Linda @A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche

Marcie has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Marcie Flinchum Atkins.