It’s time again for the Poetry Sisters’ Challenge! Here’s the scoop, via Tanita’s blog: “We’re writing back to four Lucille Clifton poems, in her notes to clark kent series: “if i should;” “further note to clark;” “final note to clark;” and “note passed to superman.” We’ll be ‘in conversation’ with Ms. Lucille’s poems – talking to them, talking back to them, or talking about them, whether that’s all of them, or any of them, either in form or in substance.”
I got really really REALLY stuck on this one. Exactly nothing useful showed up in my notebook during our 25 minute work session on Zoom last Sunday. But the magic of a shower to wash away the chlorine from my swim also unlocked the idea box. I think these responses work without reading Lucille’s poems, but just in case, take a minute to read what she said to Clark before you read what Clark wrote back.
(all four Clark Kent Writes Back poems (c) Mary Lee Hahn, 2025)
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Of the original twelve, only four were left — Peter, Andrew, James, and John.
The first eight left in the usual ways: scrambles, fry-ups, omelettes. The ordinary work of breakfast.
But now one of the remaining four would be called to sacred duty. Chocolate chip cookies.
The Hand hovered, then chose John.
“Why did that joker get picked?” whined James.
“Look at him rolling around the counter like…” Andrew began, but Peter interrupted, “No John, don’t do it! It’s just a story! There aren’t any king’s men –“
A messy SPLAT came next, then the clicking of the dog’s nails on the tile, loud slurping, and (cover the children’s ears) crunching.
John, always the one to think he understood the assignment when placed on a high, flat, horizontal surface, was gone.
Peter, Andrew, and James looked at each other. Who would be chosen next?
Sounds of measuring and mixing were heard. Apparently The Hand was not going to risk putting another of them on the counter. It was good to go straight from carton to bowl, though. Less time to get the jitters and have second thoughts. One sharp jolt, then the swan dive into the pool of creamed butter and sugar.
The Hand hovered over the remaining three.
— — — — —
“These cookies are really good! Better than usual. Did you do anything different this time?” The Man asked.
“Nope. Not a thing. I think it was the egg. It seemed extraordinary in a way I can’t really explain,” The Hand answered.
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The headline caught my eye, “Eastern monarch butterfly population nearly doubles in 2025.”
Fantastic…but 2 x 0 still = 0. I haven’t seen a monarch in my yard for several years now.
And when you dig into the article, you find that the doubling is calculated by the acreage of butterflies overwintering in Central Mexico. They are currently taking up 4.4 acres, up from 2.2 acres the year before. 4 acres is about 19,000 square yards. A football field is is 6,400 square yards. Butterflies are taking up about 3 football fields-worth of forest. Oof.
But this was supposed to be good news, so let’s focus on the doubling, and what we can all do to keep the doubling going:
Plant milkweed. Even if it doesn’t fit into your carefully planned landscaping, plant some anyway. (And get your neighbors to buy into the idea, if you can.) Milkweed is the ONLY host plant for monarch eggs and caterpillars.
Don’t use herbicides or pesticides. It won’t kill you to have some diversity in your lawn, and if you care so much about not having a few unplanned visitors in your flower beds, get out the weeding fork. (This one’s a harder sell, but get your neighbors to buy into the idea, if you can.)
That’s it. Two things. But if you want to feel like you’re doing SOMETHING to help these beautiful creatures double again, there you go. Local friends, Wild Birds Unlimited has a native plant sale going on. You can get swamp milkweed plants for $5.00. Everyone else, check out your local native plant nurseries, get out your trowel, and do your part.
Here’s the article. I wanted to get my two cents in before you clicked over. 🙂
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I follow Andrea Gibson’s substack “Things That Don’t Suck” and I saved her recent post “A List of Things I Love” but made sure I didn’t read it for awhile before I started my own list. I actually kind of forgot about it until yesterday, when I was scrolling for a minute on IG and ran across @harrybakerpoet’s list of things that bring me joy (part two here). So here’s my mostly unedited free-association list of Things I Love.
I love. I love making lists. I love crossing things I’ve done off my to-do lists. I love adding things to my to-do lists simply so I can cross them off. I love grocery lists. I love trying not to backtrack in the grocery store as I work through the grocery list. I love recipes. I love prepping the pans and gathering all the ingredients before I start the mixing and making. I love making rules for myself, like, you have to stretch before you have your morning tea. I love when I almost break my own rules but I don’t let myself. I love the randomness of my garden. I love welcoming back each perennial as they appear in spring. (“Well, hello, Bluebells! Welcome back!”) I love knowing individual trees around the city — Grandmother Oak on Selby, the enormous gingkoes at the topiary park, the white-blooming redbud on Park Avenue, the yellow magnolia at the corner of the strip mall parking lot. I love getting everything ready to visit the tax lady. (Not really. I’m trying to convince myself.) I love homemade caramels and sauerkraut cooked with beer. I love fresh uncooked green beans (same with sweetcorn), and cherry tomatoes warm off the vine. I love Cheetos and I love Lays with homemade sour cream and dry onion soup mix dip. I love the idea that most of the cells in my body (except the ones in my brain) are not the same ones I started out with. I love wearing my dad’s stick-out ears and holding fabric and needles with my mom’s knobby fingers. I love that once, when my students met my brother, they asked if we were twins. I love having two desks; three if you count the standing table in my “studio;” four if you count the sewing machine table; five if you count the kitchen table; six if you count my lap. I love the sound and feel of writing on paper with pencil (the same not-made-anymore-so-you-better-last kind of mechanical pencil I’ve been using for decades). And I love making lists.
I wrote a post last week about a random Wordle Poem rule I made up for myself. Sometimes I write a Wordle poem using my word choices, but I ALWAYS write a haiku (a Wordle-ku) if I get the answer in three guesses. (I rarely get the answer in three.)
I made up a new rule yesterday. If I get the answer in five, I will write a limerick. Or, as the case may be, a Wordle-imerick. (I often get the answer in five. Maybe this should be a suggestion, rather than a rule…)
3/12 party, laugh, mange, manga, mango
The party was held in Durango. For a laugh, we danced a wild tango. So wild we caught mange, wrote a manga quite strange, then went to the store for a mango.
(I didn’t say they’d always make sense. But I did get better.)
3/13 chair, champ, chalk, chase (yes, I broke the rule and used a four-word win)
There once was a child in a chair. Said child had some gum in his hair. He wasn’t a champ. Chalk him up as a scamp chased down with a threat and a glare.
3/19 glory, stare, shark, snark, spark
The ocean — a vast blue-green glory. I stare at its unfolding story. The fin of a shark, and its sharp toothy snark spark panic before beaches get gory.
They’re slightly addictive, but I’ll stop there. I have two more recent solved-it-in-fives that I’ll Wordle-imerick (it’s also a verb) safely out of sight in my notebook.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
I’m listening to Margaret Renkl read her book, THE COMFORT OF CROWS: A BACKYARD YEAR. Some days it’s the only thing that keeps my head from exploding.
Every couple of essays, she tucks in a praise song. Now it’s my turn. Here’s my Praise Song to Early Spring.
I live in one of the top 10 gloomiest cities in the country. When the skies are clear, and the blue makes me just want to drink up every drop of it, going for a walk is the best therapy I could wish for.
The trees are bursting with the same joy I feel. They are sure of what they need to do, and they are going about their work without an ounce of self-consciousness. Why on earth should we NOT just fling our reds and yellows toward that juicy blue sky with everything we’ve got?
Early spring gives away glimpses of secret lives if you’re paying close attention. Like Margaret says,
To pay close attention to the natural world is to exist in medias res. Life is an unfolding that responds to the cues of seasonal change, but for our purposes it is also suspended in an everlasting present. We can see some of the creatures we share our world with, or at least some evidence of their nearness, but we cannot know the full arc of their story. Every encounter in the outdoors is an episode with a cliffhanger ending.
The quote above is as true about the humans with whom we share our world as it is about our more-than-human neighbors. There’s a cemetery at the far end of our street, and it’s a quiet place to walk, say names, wonder at dates, and give thanks for life — all of it, surging so gloriously outside of us in early spring, and surging inside of us for as long as we’re given. Spring reminds me to not waste a single moment of this gift.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
I glanced at the clock on my way down to the basement.
8:11
The message couldn’t have been clearer: the Universe was validating my decision to donate my classroom poetry collection.
It’s not a small thing to let those books go. They represent a key element of my identity as a teacher. A key element of my identity, period. But this is my fourth year of retirement, and because I retired as an online teacher, it’s been five years since children held those books in their hands every week on Poetry Friday. Five years since children chose a poem by themselves or with a partner, practiced the poem, and read it aloud to the class. It’s time for these books to be back in the hands of children. They’re not doing any good on a shelf in the basement.
As I pulled books down off the shelves to box up, I had to remove lots of sticky notes that had been left behind to mark favorite poems, chosen poems, instructions on how the poem would be performed. I remembered all of the timid voices that grew confident over the course of the year. I remembered strong readers generously coaching less able readers. I remembered the whole class supporting special needs students who could only manage a few words at a time but who got the same enthusiastic finger snaps for their effort. I remembered the looks on the faces of children who found poems that spoke deeply to their cultural or linguistic identity — Black kids finding Langston Hughes, Spanish speakers finding poems in two languages, sports kids finding soccer, basketball, and football poems, sassy kids finding sassy poems, nature kids finding nature poems. I remembered the quiet new kid who knocked us all off our feet with his bold and funny performance on his first Friday in the class. He showed us more about who he really was in those few minutes than he had all the rest of the days he’d spent in the classroom with us. He was well and truly a part of our community after that day. I remembered so many moments in the second half of the year when a student would ask to perform a poem they themselves had written. Yes, yes, YES!
Half a shelf of books remain with me: the first copy of a book eventually replaced three times because of its popularity (we loved calling out, “Who has A BAD CASE OF THE GIGGLES??”), books by poets who are personal friends, books that have poems that still speak to me as an adult reader/poet.
There are seven boxes of poetry books ready to go to the school library where the bulk of the rest of my classroom collection of books now lives — a library that was a desert when my friend began working there, but through which she has transformed the entire school. My poetry books will go to her library and to the classroom libraries throughout her school where they will be read and loved once again.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
I used to start each Wordle game with the same word (adieu) to check for vowels. I also used to care deeply about my streak. Dialing back the time I spend on my phone, mostly thanks to the hellscape known as the news, has cured me of the need to Wordle every single day.
I’ve also learned from Molly the joy of starting every day with a different word, a set-the-tone word, or a hopeful word, or a just plain random word. Last Friday, I opened the blind on the east window in my office, the one to the right of my desk, and was greeted with yet another gorgeous sunrise.
First try: OPENS, and I get the P yellow and the E green. Hmm…let’s try P as the first letter and a blend…PL would work. Then the E, and let’s check another vowel…PLEA…can’t be please, that’s too long. How about PLEAD?
Whelp, the P is correct as the first letter, and I still have E in the middle spot. What other vowels could I use? PIE…what starts with PIE? I know the Wordle puzzle makers often like to try to trick us with two of the same letter, so what starts with PIE and ends with E? PIECE?
YES! I got it in three. I don’t always write a Wordle poem, but if I solve it in three tries, a haiku is mandatory.
battered heart opens pleads for a brief respite piece of joy arrives
The email from The Academy of American Poets (poets.org) told me “Get Ready For National Poetry Month!”
They read my mind. I’ve been auditioning ideas for the past several days:
Revisit favorite poetry books from my classroom collection before I donate them? (No, I’d rather get the books in the hands of young readers BEFORE April begins.)
Wordle poems? (No, too unpredictable and often too goofy or trivial.)
Response to the news? (No. Just…no. No matter how important it is to witness the horrors, this would be way too depressing.)
Nature poems inspired by Mary Oliver’s “Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.”? (That I could do.)
Devote the month to a form? (I’ve done haiku, cheritas, and golden shovels. This is a definite possibility. Maybe acrostics. Then I could respond to the news, AND “Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.” with or without a nature theme. Let’s give it a try…)
Yesterday, I had my yearly eye checkup, complete with the near-blindness of the drops that dilate your pupils.
DILATED
Devil’s in the details. Ideally, anyway. But Leave it to the Big Picture Archetype to force us to Try to see everything all at once Even when we hardly Dare to open our eyes.
(c) Mary Lee Hahn, 2025 draft
Janice has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Salt City Verse.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
As I get ready to cook dinner, I chuckle to myself remembering what a struggle it was for mom to come up with meal ideas. We were absolutely no help when she asked what she should cook. The irony is that mom was a foodie. She loved the trips to Denver with her friends to go out to eat and see a show. She was always up for trying new foods, and she instilled the spirit of adventurous eating in my brother and me. We ate lima beans and Brussels sprouts, mangos and fresh coconut, and the best homemade Roquefort salad dressing I’ve ever had. Recipes from my childhood remain in rotation with new favorites: broccoli cheese soup (with bacon), cheesy beans and rice, chicken and wild rice, Lubbers Lounge LuLu, chili bean tostadas, and hamburger cobbler, to name a few. Thanks to mom, I never struggle to know what to cook for dinner.
Mom was a collector. She especially loved miniatures and antique glassware. But she also loved Boyd Bears, Hallmark ornaments, and apparently, scissors. I have her pinking shears and fabric shears, two smaller pairs of sewing scissors, the shears she used to cut hair, several pairs of our childhood scissors, multiple embroidery scissors, various manicure scissors including our baby fingernail scissors, and, naturally, a miniature pair of scissors.
Mom was an avid reader. She and a friend would go to the library sale every year and she’d come home with multiple grocery sacks full of books. She had a clever system for making sure she didn’t accidentally re-buy a book she’d already read. Inside the back cover of the myriad paperback mysteries she read, she’d pencil her initials. Then, when the sacks of library sale books had all been read, they were re-donated to the library. At the library sale, the back cover of each book was checked before the book was added to the sack of purchases.
Mom was an amazing seamstress, a devoted volunteer (Cub Scouts, swim meets, Bible School, reading buddy), and a creative gardener (she grew asparagus and tried her hand at breeding iris).
Most of all, mom was a great mom. She worked selflessly to make sure we had more and better than she did growing up. She died on March 11, 2017, just a few months before her 90th birthday.
Dad died on March 12, 1994. I still wonder if mom held on trying to make it to March 12, as if there were a special portal on that day that would take her straight to dad. She spent the final 23 years of her life without him. He was only 67 when he died and I had just started to get to know him adult-to-adult. As I now approach the age he was when he died (mom was the same age), I have a much greater empathy for her pain and her long years of loneliness.
My primary childhood memory of dad is that he was always working. He was the parts manager of the John Deere implement store and the needs of the local farmers, especially at harvest times, kept him behind the parts counter for long hours. I remember visiting him at work during Girl Scout cookie sales season and how special it was that he took time away from the parts counter to escort me to the “foreign” world of the tractor mechanics to sell my cookies.
When he wasn’t at work, dad was working in the yard. He was proud of the lawn and the trees he managed to grow in the arid high plains. When we wasn’t working in the yard, he was reading the paper, Popular Mechanics, or Smithsonian Magazine. While mom was the actively involved parent, dad was the rock of quiet strength.
There are more memories of each of them, of course. So many more. This slice barely skims the surface. If I could give them a message as I pause on March 11th and 12th, it would be a message of gratitude for my life, and to let them know that they remain an integral part of who I am and who I continue to become.
A(nother) Year of Reading 