Blessings and Curses

Last Friday, I put out the poetry tools I've been using for this year's NPM challenge and let my students test drive them.

Magnetic Poetry

Paint Chip Poetry

Haikubes

What a blessing I received! Leave it to 10- and 11-year-olds to remind me how to really PLAY with these "tools!"

They didn't have time to draft full poems...all except this guy, who asked for permission not to switch stations so he could finish a poem, which turned out to be a heart-wrenching tribute to his mother on the theme of "appreciate what you've got while you've got it."

Other blessings I received as I played alongside them were snippets of poetry they gave me permission to borrow. Yesterday's metaphor was created by our class' member of the school dodgeball team. The competition was last night (they wound up holding onto their championship for the third year in a row) and he was thinking more literally about curveballs than I was! I have a line of magnetic poetry to work from for tomorrow's poem, and today's poem started at the paint chip table. A quiet sweetie showed her spunky side by pairing these:

That got me going on curses. I made a few of my own while we played, and then this morning, I took a page from my students' PLAYbook and dumped out all the paint chip cards on the kitchen table to find more.

I jotted them in my notebook, then went to my Merriam-Webster app and jotted down all the synonyms for CURSE.

Malediction Incantation

I curse you
with cheese puffs in your eyes!

May there be a muddy puddle pox
on your blue suede shoes!

I bestow a hex of sticky nectar
in your genie lamp!

A plague on your bright ideas --
may they slip away like quicksilver!

May your bull's-eye be blighted by
tumbleweeds

and your starship be scourged by
rust!

Your happy ending? May it be jinxed
by an unforeseen
deep
end.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Memory Throws a Last-Minute Curveball

Memory Throws a Last-Minute Curveball

your name, the punchline,
why I'm standing in this room --
all veer out of reach

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Haikubes with Hem (and Rhino)

Rhino wanted in on the act this time. But just like the last times, the minute I dumped the Haikubes on the carpet, Hem came at a gallop.

He and Rhino worked amiably to help me pick out my cubes.

Almost ready!

I found a poem that's a wish for sleep tonight. I made the mistake of drinking a cup of hot tea after school yesterday, and I woke up with a busy brain at 2:00 AM. I read for an hour, then only dozed until the alarm went off just before 5:00. Please come, honest sleep. Bring me grace!

This first week back after spring break was ridiculously hard. I just couldn't get caught up enough with school work and writing my own poems to get out and visit much. Finally, on Wednesday, I got our Poetry in the Halls posters put up. It's so fun to have many of my Poetry Friday peeps on the walls in our building's hallways!

Karen has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Karen Edmisten: The Blog with the Shockingly Clever Title.

Up

UP

The optimism of cream --
rising.

The power of frog legs --
leaping.

The cheer of sunny sides --
inspiring.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Time

Time

Is time an organized file
brimming with figures and facts?

Or is time a play in the theater
with lines and scenes and acts?

Is time a glorified drum
beating the rhythm of life?

Or is time a well-honed blade
cutting through age like a scythe?


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Idiom-osophy

I have lots of magnetics to choose from for my Magnetic Poetry play day. I got a little crazy and chose one word from every bag. I'm not going to do that again!

people, teacher, ball, stare, yesterday, everlasting, catches the worm

Idiom-osophy

History catches the worm
in an everlasting dance with destiny
while Future's teacher gets the ball rolling
past crowds of people
who simply stand
and
stare.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Peace

Hemingway helped me launch Playing With Poetry by reminding me to PLAY with the Haikubes. He LOVES the sound they make. When I dumped them on the carpet, he came running. At first he supervised while I made my choices.

But pretty soon, he wanted to click the cubes himself, then carry one away to hide under the couch.

Here's my haiku for April 1:

we, you, us...all wrong:

fortune will flock to places

parallel with peace

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Poetry Friday -- Surprises

Surprises

The first surprise--
on the logjam that crosses the river,
a mink.

Not a muskrat.

A mink.

In Ohio.

The best surprise--
turned to look upstream, checking the footing for my next step,
my eyes off the line and
a tug
a yank
a fight
a trout.

Not a bass.
A rainbow trout.
In Ohio.

The last surprise--
I've forgotten
the achingly numb feet
from a day spent standing in
fast flowing
forty degree water with a
fly rod.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019



Yes,  while others escaped to warm ocean beaches, I spent a day colder than I've ever been in my entire life and it was all worth it. (The Laphroaig may or may not have helped with that...)

Poetry Month is just around the corner. My NPM19 Poem A Day project is Playing With Poetry. I'm going to spend the month playing with Haikubes, Magnetic Poetry, Metaphor Dice, and Paint Chip Poetry. Join in if you'd like! We can use the Twitter hashtag #playwithpoetryNPM to find and support each other.


Speaking of find and support, Carol has this week's Poetry Friday roundup and her favorite daffodil poem at Carol's Corner.

2019 Poetry Month--Playing With Poetry

#playwithpoetryNPM

Nothing Gold -- After Robert Frost

Nothing Gold
after Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold
or, in the case of that bush
with its six inches of new growth,
red.

Or, in the case of that forsythia
on the south-facing side of the house,
an unbelievable shade of bright
yellow.

Or, in the case of those new shoots
knifing up from exposed iris bulbs,
a simultaneously fragile but violent
green.

All these early hues
in leaf, in flower
hard to hold as the earth moves
along its path
hour by hour
by day by day
by season by season,

not so much subsiding
as being subsumed
in the golden Eden
of Life.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019


The first draft of this poem happened in one of our five-minute quick-writes in writing workshop this week. Another reminder that these small rituals are powerful not just for our student writers, but for our own writing lives.

I have a love-hate relationship with Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost. I landed in the honors program at the University of Denver based on good grades in a sub-standard rural high school. I was over my head in so many ways. There was so much I didn't even know I didn't know. A professor attempted to teach me how to craft a critical essay by humiliating me -- by showing me the work of a classmate who was already clearly on the path to his fame as a writer. Then he asked me if this poem by Robert Frost was hopeful or hopeless. My humiliation had turned to stubborn anger, and I argued that the poem was hopeful. And then I figured out on my own how to be the kind of writer I wanted to be.

It was that experience more than any other that taught me how to teach the writer, not the writing. Every writer can move to the next level, but you can only begin from where they are the moment they show you their own work.


Rebecca has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Sloth Reads, and how perfect is that? Tomorrow is National Goof Off Day, when our spring break begins!