EARTH SPEAKS
My
oceans
are dying.
My forests are
cut down or burning.
My systems are weakened,
and my glaciers are melting.
So many species are extinct.
How can I convince you to help me?
© Mary Lee Hahn, 2022
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Today, Earth Day 2022, I’ll pass the mic to Earth and let her speak. All the rest of my NPM 2022 poems can be found at Poetrepository.
Margaret has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Reflections on the Teche.
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From the essay, “Loving a Vanishing World,” by Emily N. Johnston in ALL WE CAN SAVE:
“It’s a constant question for me every time I’m entranced by the beauty of this world: What does it mean to love this place? What does it mean to love anyone or anything in a world whose vanishing is accelerating, perhaps beyond our capacity to save the things that we love most?”
Here’s the 2018 NYTimes article about the insect apocalypse that’s been haunting me for four years.
This is not one of my more hopeful poems. It’s hard to witness the natural world fading away, but loving the world is the first step toward saving it.
Matt has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme.
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Contrails don’t give me hope in a time of climate crisis. They play a significant role in aviation-related global warming by creating clouds that trap heat on earth. But the fact that scientists are studying them does give me hope. The sudden, dramatic drop in airplane traffic in 2020 proved to researchers at MIT that their mapping of contrails was accurate.
Researchers at the Yale School of the Environment remind us that the ONLY way to shut down global warming is to curb CO2 emissions.
“But if the world wants a big short-term contribution from aircraft to keep us below some specific temperature target, such as 1.5 degrees C, then action on contrails can provide it.”
“working with major airlines to forecast regions in the atmosphere where contrails may form, and to reroute planes around these regions to minimize contrail production.
Steven Barrett, professor and associate head of MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “There’s an unusual opportunity to halve aviation’s climate impact by eliminating most of the contrails produced today.”
“Most measures to make aviation sustainable take a long time,” Barrett says. “(Contrail avoidance) could be accomplished in a few years, because it requires small changes to how aircraft are flown, with existing airplanes and observational technology. It’s a near-term way of reducing aviation’s warming by about half.” “
Now THAT’S hopeful. Let’s go, airline industry. The ball’s in your court.
This poem was written using The Thing Is by Ellen Bass as a mentor text. All of my poems from this week can be found here.
Janice has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Salt City Verse.
I’m reading and listening to ALL WE CAN SAVE: TRUTH, COURAGE, AND SOLUTIONS FOR THE CLIMATE CRISIS.
My poems this month will be inspired by the essays and poems in this book, and by this gorgeous living planet we call home.
Sometimes I get a panicky feeling about our future, but I’m trying hard to hold onto hope and to the actions I can take, no matter how small. It is not too late to turn things around, but I can’t sit on the couch waiting for someone else to do something.
Throughout the week, I’ll be posting at Poetrepository, but I’ll do a mini roundup here on Fridays.
Today’s poem does double-duty. I challenged the Inklings to write a poem using The Thing Is by Ellen Bass as a mentor text. I wrote a couple of drafts, but when I fully processed that this poem would need to introduce my NPM project, it was back to the writer’s notebook to draft again.
Here’s how the rest of the Inklings interpreted my challenge:
Linda@A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly@Nix the Comfort Zone
Catherine@Reading to the Core
Margaret@Reflections on the Teche
Heidi has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at my juicy little universe. Happy National Poetry Month! Let the flood of poetry begin!
I love writing from an image. I love short form poetry. So this month’s Poetry Sisters challenge was right up my alley: ekphrastic dodoitsus. When we dug into the definition of dodoitsus, however, we learned that they are more complicated than a simple 7-7-7-5 syllable count. “The dodoitsu often focuses on love or work with a comical twist.” I’m not sure how well I satisfied all of the requirements, but it was lots of fun.
This first picture is at the historic Open Air School here in Columbus. They have completed renovations and one of our new favorite restaurants, Emmett’s, is located there.
After so many courses
laid with rhythmic precision
I can’t stand it anymore.
Time for a jazz riff.
© Mary Lee Hahn, 2022
In this one, the poem only matches the photo on the theme of careless quality control. It’s based on a story Molly Hogan told, and so I’m sorry to tell you that it is as true as that unsliced apple in the picture. But a LOT more gross.
In the pickle factory,
he left the frogs on the belt.
Quality control loophole:
squeamish inspector.
© Mary Lee Hahn, 2022
This last one stretches all the rules about love, work, and comical twist, but I had fun working backward from the last line — a five-syllable word!
When you’re blessed with a surfeit
of citrus deliciousness
what matters not the least is
uniformity.
© Mary Lee Hahn, 2022
Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters came up with:
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Kelly @ Kelly Ramsdell
Andi @ A Wrung Sponge
Amy LV has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at The Poem Farm.
If you want to join the Poetry Sisters’ challenge for next month, we’re going to write in the style of Taylor Mali, which is to say there might be metaphor dice involved, and perhaps some eloquently long-winded spoken-word poetry which may or may not be recorded in videos. Mali’s mentor poems are not always appropriate for children/students, but that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow his style if not all of his subject matter and/or word and gesture choices.
I’m sure you know Mali’s “What Teachers Make,” (look at who he’s on stage with in this version) and if you don’t know “When I Miss Teaching,” it’s time to do something about that. Especially that ending. So true. You should read “The Impotence of Proofreading,” rather than watching it, but in either case, make sure you don’t have food or drink in your mouth. (if you watch, the other guy on stage has warmed up a bit…)
Next week begins the zaniness known as Poetry Month, in which I write AND PUT OUT IN THE WORLD a poem a day. According to Poetrepository, this will be my 9th year of this madness. However, there are three more years of poems at A Year of Reading that I need to move over to Poetrepository. So it’s actually my 12th year. Wow. I’ve got my 2022 theme, but not my cute graphic made on Canva, so you’ll have to stay tuned. I’ll be posting on Poetrepository, but will round up the highlights here on Fridays.
Margaret gave the Inklings their challenge for this month: “Choose a quote that speaks to you. Write a poem that responds to the quote. The words can be used as a golden shovel or throughout the poem or as an epigraph.”
I cheated just a little. I found a poem that I wrote back in June of 2021, just after retirement, and then went looking for a quote that fit with it as an epigraph.
Here’s how the rest of the Inklings interpreted Margaret’s challenge:
Linda@A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly@Nix the Comfort Zone
Catherine@Reading to the Core
Margaret@Reflections on the Teche
Kat has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at Kathryn Apel.
The photo for today’s post is via Unsplash.
This month, poetry met parlor game as the Poetry Sisters collaborated to create an Exquisite Corpse poem. Unlike the “rules,” we did not use an agreed-upon structure and we constructed the poem one line at a time rather than one word at a time. Liz started us off, sending Tanita her line. Based on Liz’s line, Tanita wrote a line and then send just her line to Kelly. From Kelly, a line went to Sara. Andi was next, then Laura, Tricia, and finally me. Here’s what we wrote:
This month, odd one out, running short on days and sleep,
This month, past meets pride, roots ripped from native soil still somehow grow.
The once-bright future dims. Shadows grow
But there, near canyon rim, in broken light
the yearling hawk shrieked in futile fury
and the steel-edged clouds looked away
trees bow and bend on a blustery day
that rattles old oak leaves down the street.
In creating our final drafts from this rich loam of raw material, we agreed that it was fair game to use as much or little of the original as we saw fit. Here’s the best of my many drafts.
Poetry Sister Tricia has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at The Miss Rumphius Effect.
Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters came up with:
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Kelly @ Kelly Ramsdell
Andi @ A Wrung Sponge
Next month we are writing ekphrastic Doditsu. You can learn about this poetic from Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest. They are a little more complicated than a simple syllable count, as I once believed! The Dodoitsu often focuses on love or work with a comical twist. We are sharing images in our group, but you can write to anything you like. If you want to be inspired by my image, here’s what I shared.
The oak leaf photo above is via Unsplash.
On the third day of Laura Shovan’s February 10th Annual February Poetry Project, which is centered around the theme of time, the prompt was a photo of the massive carved stone calendar of the Aztecs. Coincidentally, I have a souvenir version of that calendar sitting on the hallway shelf beside an old Seth Thomas chiming clock. Here’s the poem I wrote.
Linda has this week’s Valentine Edition of the Poetry Friday roundup at TeacherDance.
This month, Catherine challenged the Inklings to write a mathematical poem of any kind. Rather than choose a mathematical form, like a Fib or an Equation Poem, I went with a mathematical topic/vocabulary.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, AJ and volunteer for our local resource center. We take their van and pick up donations from Target, Kroger, and the Pepperidge Farms outlet store. Experiencing retail from the loading dock and storeroom side has been an eye opener. We stand waiting for our cart of donations and ponder all that…STUFF in the back room of one store in one city and when we multiply that by all the stores in all the cities, our minds are blown by what it takes to fill shelves so that consumers can satisfy their every want and need.
Here’s how the rest of the Inklings interpreted Catherine’s challenge:
Linda@A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly@Nix the Comfort Zone
Catherine@Reading to the Core
Margaret@Reflections on the Teche
Elisabeth has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Unexpected Intersections.
Early this month, I had the good fortune to attend a Zoom session hosted by Georgia Heard, with George Ella Lyon as the special guest. I jotted PAGES of “George Ella Gems,” then typed them up and cut them apart. I had a draft I liked, but then this morning, I didn’t like it. Easy enough to create a new draft! An unspoken sub-challenge this month was to put your poem into Canva. Here’s my draft for now:
Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters came up with:
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Kelly @ Kelly Ramsdell
Andi @ A Wrung Sponge
Irene has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at Live Your Poem, where you can “overhear” lots of poetry talk!
In February, the Poetry Sisters are going to try one or more Exquisite Corpse poems. We’re not sure exactly how we’re going to do them, and there’s a lot of wiggle room. Read about them, and then figure out how YOU’D like to use or be inspired by the game. We’ll share our poems on Feb. 25th, and you can, too! If you share on social media, use the hashtag #PoetryPals. We can’t wait to see what you (and we?) do with this! Have fun!
A(nother) Year of Reading 