Imagine

Imagine

the silent bubble of April

twirling

over garden, 

over nest.

Follow.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Haikubes With Hem

my balance calls

I slowly return home 

the glorious next

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Hem is sad to see Poetry Month drawing to a close. He'll miss stealing haikubes from the pile and batting them underneath the couch. And they are so fun to lay on while Mom is trying to choose just the right ones. But how come she can bat them around with her paws, but I get in trouble for the same thing, Hem wonders. 

I am also sad to see Poetry Month coming to an end. Sad, and yet needing all my time and energy to focus on "the glorious next" of May in 5th grade. My balance will just have to keep calling until the end of the month. That's the way this gig works. Wouldn't have it any other way.  

The Key to Happiness: Some Food for Thought

Today's challenge:
One randomly drawn prompt
and one randomly drawn paint chip.

The Key to Happiness: Some Food for Thought

You want everything to be plum perfect?
I'm here to tell you you're as likely to get a lemon

as you are a piece of cake.

You might be the big cheese,

and as cool as a cucumber,

but you'll still get your goose cooked now and then.

Take this with a grain of salt

or take this like candy from a baby --

the key to happiness is

not worth a hill of beans

unless the fruit of your labors 

is a bowl of cherries 

that you are willing 

to share.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Found

Found

Squirrels
nip the tips
off branches.

You can tell
because the cut
is slanted.

The size of oak's leaves
has doubled
in a week.

Some are cupped
(to receive sun?)
all are fuzzy.

Look at the table.
This is how shade happens in spring:
suddenly.


©Mary Lee Hahn



None of the usual poetry tools today, just this twig in a glass on the kitchen table.

A Lazy Symphony

A Lazy Symphony

so much depends
upon

a delicate spring
moment

languid with sweet
beauty

a lazy symphony of
flowers


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019


This is another "cross-out" poem, an idea shared by Laura Shovan in her Nerdy Book Club Poetry Month FB event. I wrote one inspired by Emily Dickinson last Sunday. This one was inspired by William Carlos Williams' Red Wheelbarrow.

Carol V. has this week's Poetry Friday Roundup at Beyond LiteracyLink.

And Then on Top of Everything Else

And Then on Top of Everything Else (a teacher's rant)

Let's set the stage--
the calendar page
hasn't turned to May
yet every single day

is filled to the brim
and you're drowning, can't swim,
got to keep the momentum
and don't even mention

paperwork
meetings
testing
talent show
field trip
author visit
summer reading.

On top of all that
(magnify the impact)
the impossible curse of your body:
you're sick.
(Pass the toddy.)


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

New Little Tree

We added a new member to our garden family on Earth Day. Welcome, Cranberry Viburnum! Nature's first green is sometimes red!

I accidentally left all my poetry tools at school, but luckily, there's Magnetic Poetry Online! Here's a haiku for our new little tree:

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Uncle Bob -- A Prose Poem

A jumble of memories

Uncle Bob was not my uncle. He was my dad's cousin, but the closest thing to family we had. He also was not a cowboy, but if you saw his slow, bow-legged saunter, his cowboy hat, his blue jeans and western snap-fasten shirts, that's what you might think. You wouldn't know by looking that he was the canniest dry-land farmer in the Great Plains of Eastern Colorado. He was born and raised in the part of Colorado without mountain peaks and rich soil. His landscape was wide and flat and dry. Dirt roads with thistle in the ditches marked the edges of native grassland pasture and wheat fields. Uncle Bob had a deep understanding of the land he farmed, never succumbing to "the grass is greener" mentality of irrigation. He was a dry-land farmer whose harvest depended on the land and the weather. There were good years with enough moisture, and plenty of years with dust devils and tumbleweeds before the rain came...or didn't come. In the summer, many a cumulonimbus cloud appeared on the horizon, only to take its rain elsewhere, but perhaps also its hail. A winter blizzard was a mixed blessing of wind that carried topsoil away and brought moisture that did or didn't cover the fields to nourish the winter wheat. Uncle Bob secured his success by collaborating with the land and the climate, but he allied with another of the vast natural resources of Eastern Colorado for his final venture -- harvesting the wind with graceful lines of enormous turbines.

In my mind, it is night. I stand in the dusty yard where I played as a child, rusty tractors along the fence, the Milky Way a bright smear across the impossibly dark sky. Uncle Bob is in it all -- land, sky, and wind.

Not Giant...Yet

I count baby oak leaves among the cutest of spring's babies. It's hard to imagine that these fragile fingertip-length leaves will be bigger than my whole hand by the middle of June. And the photosynthetic glucose factory inside each one of them...don't even get me started on that miracle.

There's a new Rhino in town, a watering can rhino, and she helped me write a haiku for the baby oak leaves.

your glorious life

grand, gorgeous -- so not giant

sweet home for my heart

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

To Make a Forest

Flickr Creative Commons Photo 

To Make a Forest, After Emily Dickinson

To make a forest it takes one spring and eternity,
The delicate goddess of this spring mist and one enormous eternity.
Plus moments.
The sweet moments alone will do,
If eternity is few.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019


This is a "cross-out" poem, an idea shared by Laura Shovan in her Nerdy Book Club Poetry Month FB event.

It is also a magnetic poetry poem. Thank goodness FOREST was right on top in the box!