I’m having great fun with my 2024 NPM project. I’m writing daily (mostly privately), and…audiencing. After ten years of public projects, when I never managed to both write AND appreciate the writing of others, it feels good to spend time each day reading, appreciating, and being inspired by all you’ve been up to! (If I’ve missed yours, leave a link in the comments!)
This poem was inspired by the villanelle Tanita wrote this week. She compared the experience of writing a villanelle to the Poetry Sisters’ recent writing of another form with repeating lines — the pantoum. I wanted to test Tanita’s hypothesis that a villanelle is better for “…short lines, direct ideas. It’s good for inescapable truths. A pantoum sometimes leaves more wiggle room…”
I’m not sure I hit upon any inescapable truths, but I did have fun.
Jone has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup. Happy National Poetry Month!
I gave the Inklings their challenge this month. I asked them to “Write a haiku sequence that talks about poetry without mentioning it by name. Here is your mentor text.”
I initially approached the challenge in an entirely left-brained way. Not surprisingly, my attempt fell flat. Once I got that out of my system, I was able to write poetically about writing poetry.
Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met my challenge:
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Too. Much. Rain.
We had probably 1.5″ yesterday, and so far this morning 1.75″ with more forecast for today, tomorrow…all the way through to Friday, with a brief respite before it clouds up again on Monday for the eclipse.
“Lake Easement” has engulfed both back beds…
…but our neighbor has it worse.
Here’s my haiku for today:
aftermath robin song signals respite it won’t last
I was as mesmerized by the story of this unlikely hero as many New Yorkers were. And I was as devastated by his death. The necropsy report was recently released, showing that he had high levels of rat poison in his system, along with a severe pigeon virus. Both of which likely contributed to his demise.
Is the vandal who slashed open Flaco’s enclosure at the zoo responsible for his death, or for his incredible final year of life? Would as many people have pondered the importance of The Wild if Flaco had remained in his cage? How can we refocus this attention on the plight of a single bird and help people to understand the cataclysmic extinctions of entire species every. single. day. (up to 150 species per day, according to some estimates)?
Maybe the human brain is incapable of wrapping itself around the big picture, and the best we can do is to love and care for The Wild in our own yard, neighborhood, and city. On that note, I’m going to go check to see if the milkweed in my garden has poked its head up yet. Maybe this summer, I will have monarchs again. If not, I will have done my best for them.
Here’s how the rest of the Poetry Sisters met the challenge of a pantoum to, about, or including an animal:
Yesterday, Maggie Smith (the poet) wrote a column entitled “Cross-Pollination.” In it she said,
“It often feels magical to me, the way our work is constantly in conversation — with the work of others, and with the work we’ve done before, with the world we live in. Everything touches.”
Maggie Smith
I read this quote after everything else happened. It gave me goosebumps.
Here’s what happened. First thing yesterday morning, I read this poem by Jane Hirschfield in THE ASKING.
Next, I wrote this cherita in response:
After I added the cherita to my IG stories and the Stafford Challenge 2024 collection on my profile page, I got ready to go to the health club for my Wednesday workout. But my car keys weren’t in the basket where we always leave them. Nor were they in my purse with the house keys. Or the pockets of the coat I wore on Tuesday. The car was locked, so I must have brought them inside. AJ didn’t have them. They were nowhere to be found.
Around and around the house I went, looking at every possible surface. Then I remembered that I had taken the red insulated bag with drinks and snacks to my day of roster judging the election on Tuesday. Not in the bag.
At this point, I grabbed a flashlight to try spotlighting it. And suddenly, there it was:
Between the cutting board and the sink. Where I put it down so I could put the spoon from the red bag into the dishwasher before taking the red bag to the basement and consequently forgetting about the key.
Habit. Routine. I’ve learned that life runs more smoothly if I make sure I put things away where they belong. A place for everything and everything in its place. Which works, except when it doesn’t. In this case, though, Habit and Routine gave me a Life Imitates Art / Art Imitates Life kind of day.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
It’s Election Day in Ohio. My third election serving as a roster judge.
I woke up before my 4:00am alarm, dreaming strange dreams about my first apartment. I have to be on site at 5:30am. My tea is brewing as I write.
I will spend the day greeting folks from my neighborhood/area — the ones who didn’t vote early and who will bother to come and voice their preference for presidential candidate (even though that’s already been settled) and for judges and other offices on the ballot.
Pretty much all day, I will be sitting in a folding chair in a chilly church gymnasium.
Other poll workers complain about the long day, but I have been a teacher. I have gotten up extra early to finish plans or read the last few essays, worked a day where pretty much all day I was on my feet moving from student to student, group to group, teaching, guiding, putting out behavioral fires. As a poll worker, I get a one-hour lunch. As a teacher, I often ate my lunch while I was doing recess duty. Then, with a 1/2 hour break after the students left, I started another half day of work and did parent conferences until 8:00pm or later. And got up in the morning and did it, more or less, all over again, day after day, week after week, year after year. Yes, this will be a long day, but it will be one day, and the work will not be at all hard.
When we close the polls, I will be achey and exhausted, but glad that I was able to help Democracy march forward in my small way.
When I retired, I was achey and exhausted, but glad I was able to help Public Education march forward in my small way.
Christmas Hellebore in January (and she’s STILL blooming in March!)
Under the oak.
Such a beauty!
A daily cherita…
Before I planted hellebores
I never noticed them.
Now I see them everywhere. What else have I been missing?
(c) Mary Lee Hahn, 2024
I’m going to feast my eyes on all the early bloomers in the next couple of days: forsythia, dogwood, magnolias, daffodils, hyacinths, crocuses, and of course, all the hellebores. Because Sunday through Thursday next week the nighttime temperatures will be in the twenties. Before we get there, though, we’ve got to live through the tornado watch for tonight. Ah, springtime.
Cousin Tanita at {fiction, instead of lies} has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup. Or should I say…the UNBOUND up! Here’s to “all things lax, roomy, slack, and slouchy!”
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Ten days ago, I moved an item from my bucket list to my treasured memory list. In a cold rain in the pitch-dark of nearly-bedtime on a boardwalk over a tiny patch of bald cypress swamp with a red light flashlight I met my very first in-the-wild spotted salamanders.
These were salamanders returning, as all salamanders do, to the vernal pool where they were born. As adults, they live in burrows in the nearby woods.
Salamanders respond to soil temperature to let them know when it’s time to crawl out of their burrows in the forest and return home to mate.
A female salamander can store packets of spermatophore inside her body for years as insurance for the continuation of the species.
If a vernal pool is drying up too fast, a young salamander tadpole can speed up development so that they can reach adulthood — albeit smaller than usual — before the pool is gone.
Salamanders can live twenty years in the wild.
Their mechanisms for survival are so very elegant and woven so perfectly with their corner of the natural world. Which is a sentence that can be written about every species of living thing on this planet.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
It’s like riding your bike up the street past the high school towards the swimming pool and seeing the parking lot full of cars. Which is odd, because there’s usually like three cars — just the high school lifeguards who get there early to check the chemicals and maybe vacuum some of the gravel out of the bottom of the pool after last night’s thunderstorm. Rescue a few critters and skim a bunch of crickets before the summer swim team practices.
It’s like walking up to the breezeway that’s usually silent and dark with only the bright blue of the pool on the other end to light it up and finding it buzzing with activity and the pool divided up with lane lines and decorated above with plastic banners and -bang!- there’s a starter’s gun and splashing and cheering and…
It’s like everybody else knew there was a swim meet today and you are just showing up for a regular practice.
That’s what it feels like to be tiptoeing in here on the fifth day of your big month-long swim meet of writing. I’ll just stand here in the shade by the clerk of the course while you all find your lanes and swim with your strongest strokes and team up for the relays. I’ll cheer you on and bring you bunches of cold green grapes to give you energy.
Happy March Slicing Challenge, all! May you make it to the finish line without your goggles ever fogging up!
A(nother) Year of Reading 