Showing posts with label chant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chant. Show all posts

Friday, July 26, 2019

Poetry Friday -- What We Save




This is a repost from 2008.

My brother and I just spent three days going through the last of the boxes of Mom and Family back home in Colorado. Among other treasures, we found a stack of clippings Mom had pinned on the bulletin board in the kitchen -- pithy quotes, comics, phone numbers...and this poem, printed from the blog eleven years ago.

*        *        *        *        *


This is a chant for the landscape of my growing up years -- the wide, flat, empty, semi-arid short grass prairie of eastern Colorado. The chant is comprised of images, authors, and, in italics, book titles.



The Solace of Open Places

or
It's Not the End of the Earth, But You Can See it From Here

High, Wide and Lonesome
unbroken sod,
O Pioneers! and
my Uncle Bob.

Great Plains: jackrabbits
antelope and Deere,
wagon ruts, meadowlarks
and tumbleweeds found here.

Kent Haruf, Hal Borland, Ian Frazier,
Gretel Ehrlich, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner.

EventidePlainsong
A Sense of Place,
Wolf WillowMy Antonia
Nothing To Do But Stay.

Lark buntings, windmills
towering thunderheads,
grasshoppers, feedlots
the family homestead.

Pioneer Women,
amber waves of grain.
Close my eyes, open a book,
can go home again.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2008



Margaret has the Poetry Friday Roundup this week at Reflections on the Teche.

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Go, Go, Grapes!


by April Pulley Sayre
Beach Lane Books, 2012

I said it last year when I reviewed Rah, Rah, Radishes!, and I'll say it again this year: April Pulley Sayre is the queen of chants!

She's chanting to the choir with both of these books, but a quick peek at my counter and refrigerator will show that I don't need ANY convincing on the subject of fruit! (How on earth am I going to eat a pint of blueberries, 2 mangoes, a pineapple and a bag of bing cherries before I leave on Friday?!?!)

As with Rah, Rah, Radishes!, Go, Go, Grapes! features vivid photos from farmer's markets and groceries around Ohio and Indiana, along with some guest appearances from a Vietnamese farmer's market in New Orleans for some of the most exotic fruits.

Word study? Check out these JUICY words!

Science? Use this book with your plant unit!

Writing workshop? Go gather up a collection of words on a topic and try writing your own chant!