One perfectly still evening last summer, as I stood in our back yard, I happened to look down the easement and notice the cottonwood that sends her wads of floating seeds our way every spring. Taller than the rest of the trees, her crown was still lit by the almost-setting sun, and although there was not even a breath of a breeze, the cottonwood leaves were DANCING! It felt like the tree could hear a music that was being played only for her. Since then, I’ve looked for other cottonwoods around town. There’s one near my health club, and although she’s nearly bald now, her remaining leaves, too, dance to a music I can’t hear and a breeze I can’t feel. It’s magical, and a great reminder to stop and look up.
One of my all-time favorite poems is “Turtle,” by Kay Ryan. Every time I read it, I am gobsmacked by the language, the metaphors, the internal rhyme, the enjambment. It just begs to be read aloud. Go ahead. I’ll wait while you do. The whole poem can be found at The Poetry Foundation.
Turtle by Kay Ryan
Who would be a turtle who could help it? A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, she can ill afford the chances she must take in rowing toward the grasses that she eats. Her track is graceless, like dragging a packing-case places, and almost any slope defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical, she’s often stuck up to the axle on her way to something edible. With everything optimal, she skirts the ditch which would convert her shell into a serving dish.
Am I right? A masterpiece, isn’t it?
Then, about a week ago, a Ted Kooser poem popped up on A Writer’s Almanac. A turtle poem in disguise. A worthy companion poem for “Turtle.” The whole poem is here.
Student by Ted Kooser
The green shell of his backpack makes him lean into wave after wave of responsibility, and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,
paddling ahead. He has extended his neck to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak, breaks the surf.
Very different poet, very different poem…and yet the endings of both poems speak to each other in interesting ways, don’t they?
I didn’t do a search to find out how many other turtle poems there are out there in the world. (Part of me is satisfied with just these two.) But the moon and turtles definitely share a moment in indigenous legends, and we do know that the moon has had more than her share of poems, so it stands to reason that it would be just as hard to write something original about turtles as it is about the moon. But Ryan and Kooser sure do want to make you try, don’t they?
Rose has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at (isn’t THAT a coincidence???) Imagine the Possibilities.
The Veteran in a New Field by Winslow Homer, via The Metropolitan Museum of Art
I wrote this at Jone’s Poetry Pop-Up last week. Gratitudes to Jone for the opportunity to write in community, and for the great prompt — simply…Harvest.
The Inklings prompt for this month came from Linda.
“This prompt comes from an Instagram post of the redroompoetry account:
“Find a poem you like, or one you don’t like. Write the first 6 lines of the poem. Under each line write your own response. Delete the original lines, use what you have as a beginning for your poem.” Tusiata Avia #30in30 writing prompt.”
I chose Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” as my core poem.
I have a small amount of trauma around this poem, caused by an English professor who used it to bully long ago me. That might account for the responses I wrote to each line!
I like how the final version turned out and I’d like to go back and tell that English professor that I stand by my belief that Frost’s poem is not sad, nor is it negative. Frost was simply telling it like it is: the things that are gold really cannot stay. But all is not lost — there are new “golds” just around the corner of every day and spring WILL come again.
Here’s what the other Inklings came up with (and Margaret has the Poetry Friday roundup this week):
Me. I’m to blame. I had the challenge for the Poetry Sisters this month. I found it in THE CREATIVITY PROJECT, edited by Colby Sharp. Each of the forty-four contributors to the book submitted two prompts. Colby doled out the prompts, each person receiving two from which they could choose one to use “to inspire an awesome creation.” The book is filled with those wildly creative creations! In addition, the book contains “forty-four fresh new prompts, one from each contributor, intended for you, to inspire your own creations.” I chose Colby’s challenge from page 257:
“You know it, that awful moment your coherent self-image shatters and a part of you, shadowy and untended, splits off to cause harm and havoc as the rest of you watches helplessly, wincing. You know the next moment, too — the desperate wish for an undo button you know cannot be had, no matter your protestations and prostrations.”
Oh, yeah. The list of things in my life that have been all my fault are definitely wince- and cringe-worthy. I couldn’t imagine writing about any of those.
“Shame’s the deal killer, the dream destroyer and toxic. It’s often on offer, but we don’t have to accept it.”
We don’t have to accept the shame. Let’s write that on our hearts and move forward.
Luckily, I had several very fruitful inspirations for my poem(s) today. First, in our zoom on Sunday, some of the other Poetry Sisters suggested using an inanimate object, a cascade of events, an environmental crisis, or a mentor poem such as “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “This is Not to Say.” Those suggestions helped free me from my life-list of blunders. But it was Joyce Sidman’s book DEAR ACORN (LOVE, OAK), which sits at the end of my desk, that gave me my entry point. That book, plus some recent events in my garden.
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Tricia has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at The Miss Rumphius Effect, and the rest of the Poetry Sisters’ offerings are here:
Today’s poem is pure play! I’m reading Ada Limón’s new collection, STARTLEMENT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, and I was taken by the first line of the poem “Prologue: This Big Fake World.” I used it as my first line and went from there. When the lines started to rhyme, I leaned into it and had fun.
Talk about leaning in and having fun…how about those New England asters and the black-eyed Susans in the corner of my garden?!? Eye-poppingly fun!
Since we are not your typical “Go Bucks!” people, we will be enjoying a quiet city tomorrow evening while everyone else is glued to their TV sets for OSU vs. TX.
It will be perfect for reading through the Poetry Friday Roundup, which Linda is hosting at TeacherDance.
Margaret challenged the Inklings this month to write a kenning poem — a poem in which “A figurative compound word that takes the place of an ordinary noun.” I started my brainstorm list of compound words while sitting in a Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams shop for an Ice Cream Social fundraiser for Casting for Recovery. But as joyful as it was to be infused with the scent of waffle cones and delighted by the giggles of children, I couldn’t shake the dark cloud of the deaths of Dolly Parton and Wendell Berry, Pierre Damas Bel, and now Gloria Steinem, too. Life seems determined to remind us that grief is the flip side of joy. Sigh.
No Catherine this week, and maybe no Heidi, who is in the midst of her big move. Here are all the possible Inkling links. We’ll see who manages to join in!
Last Tuesday, we watched “Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World,” an American Masters program on PBS. For the first time ever, I watched TV with my notebook open in front of me, taking notes. It was touching to see so many pictures of her young, wide open face. And the lineup of celebrities who helped pay tribute! Stephen Colbert, Ada Limón, Oprah, Jason Reynolds…wow.
Looking back on my notes, I realized that the were enough turns (or segments) in Mary Oliver’s life for a haiku sonnet: four 5-7-5 haiku ending with one 5 or 7 syllable couplet. And so a new form is born: the biographical haiku sonnet! My poem goes from childhood, to teen years, to adulthood. Next comes the death of her beloved, Molly Malone Cook, and Mary Oliver gets the last word with a line from her poem, “Wild Geese.”
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The Poetry Sisters’ challenge this month was to write haiku sonnets. As usual, I’m not sure which of the Poetry Sisters are in this month, but here they all are, just in case:
Night before last, we had 4 inches of rain over the course of a couple of hours. The day before that was the first dry day after 11 days straight of rain. We have named the low spot in the easement and the iris bed “Lake Lincoln.” The zinnias are managing to deal with the constant intermittent flooding, but I’m afraid the iris are on their way out. I will save any I can and adapt to what seems to be the new normal of slow moving storms that produce torrential rains by planting a rain garden. (So far, we are more than 8 inches above our normal rainfall.) Although, it would be just my luck that the weather patterns would shift and we’d be thrown into the severe drought that other places in the country are suffering…
We’ve got a week of dry and cooler weather coming up next week and you can bet we’re going to enjoy it. The places around the area that had more severe flooding will be cleaning up and drying out. The parts of town that were hit hardest by a tornado and straight line winds in the 8/11 deracho storm are still working to clear downed and damaged trees.
Denise has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Dare to Care.
