Category: Literature

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National Poetry Month’s KidLit Progressive Poem – April 2025


The annual National Poetry Month Kidlit Progressive Poem is well underway, and along with other poets who have added a line before mine, I’m adding one today.  Margaret Simon is our host, inviting 30 poets to create a communal poem throughout these 30 days of National Poetry Month.

My line follows Amy’s line from yesterday:

Open an April window

let sunlight paint the air

stippling every dogwood

dappling daffodils with flair

Race to the garden

where woodpeckers drum

as hummingbirds thrum

in the blossoming Sweetgum

Sing as you set up the easels

dabble in the paints

echo the colors of lilac and phlox

commune without constraints

Breathe deeply the gifts of lilacs

rejoice in earth’s sweet offerings

feel renewed-give thanks at day’s end

remember long-ago springs

Bask in a royal spring meadow

Tune in tomorrow to see what Margaret Simon adds! You can see the list of poets and their dates below.

April 1 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise

April 2 Tricia Stohr-Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect

April 3 Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge

April 4 Donna Smith at Mainely Write

April 5 Denise Krebs at Dare to Care

April 6 Buffy Silverman 

April 7 Jone Rush MacCulloch

April 8 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse

April 9 Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference 

April 10 Marcie Flinchum Atkins

April 11 Rose Capelli at Imagine the Possibilities 

April 12 Fran Haley at Lit Bits and Pieces

April 13 Cathy Stenquist

April 14 Janet Fagel at Mainely Write

April 15 Carol Varsalona at Beyond LiteracyLink

April 16 Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm

April 17 Kim Johnson at Common Threads

April 18 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche

April 19 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page

April 20 Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading

April 21 Tanita Davis 

April 22 Patricia Franz

April 23 Ruth at There’s no such thing as a Godforsaken town

April 24 Linda Kulp Trout 

April 25 Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe

April 26 Michelle Kogan 

April 27 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance

April 28 Pamela Ross at Words in Flight

April 29 Diane Davis at Starting Again in Poetry

April 30 April Halprin Wayland at Teaching Authors

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VerseLove Day 16: Etheree Poems with Katrina Morrison

Our host for Day 16 of VerseLove at http://www.ethicalela.com is Katrina Morrison, who teaches English and German in a rural community in Osage County, Oklahoma.

Katrina inspires us to write etheree poems and shares her process: “Etheree Taylor Armstong, an Arkansas poet, created the simple eponymous Etheree. An etheree consists of ten lines with each line’s syllabication increasing by one. Line 1 begins with one syllable, line two has two syllables, line three has three syllables, etc. Proceed this way until you have composed a poem with ten lines.” You can read her full prompt here.

The Poetry Fox

have you ever seen a fox type poems

on a classic vintage typewriter

pecking with his paws at the keys

pounding out on-demand verse

for people offering

their favorite words,

then reading each

aloud to

human

hearts?

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#VerseLove Day 14 with Padma Venkatraman – Safe Spaces

Padma Venkatraman, our host for Day 14 of VerseLove 2025, is the author of The Bridge Home, Born Behind Bars, A Time to Dance, Island’s End and Climbing the Stairs. Her books have sold over ¼ million copies, received over 20 starred reviews, and won numerous awards: Walter Dean Myers Award, South Asia Book Award, Golden Kite, ALA Notable etc.

Today, she inspires us to read her poem entitled Safe Spaces and think about a place that feels like a safe harbor – and bring that space alive in a poem.  You can read her full prompt here.

My friend Margaret Simon, host of Poetry Friday, introduced me to a Shadorma form. I love the short forms, and this one contains six lines with this syllable pattern: 3-5-3-3-7-5. I’m trying this for my safe space poem today.

Safe Harbor Shadorma

safe harbors

places we can breathe

without fear

but tell me ~

do they exist anymore

in this mess of now?

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#VerseLove Day 12 with Kate Sjostrom of Illinois – Literacy Memories

Our host for the 12th day of VerseLove2025 is Kate Sjostrom, a teacher educator at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She inspires us to write our favorite literacy memory in a poem. You can read her full prompt here.

I’m sharing a pantoum today – – of the poem that started it all for me…..my deep love of poetry comes down to one poem that mesmerized me and wouldn’t turn loose. It still holds me captive, and it’s the reason I often wear green glass beads…….Overheard on a Salt Marsh, by Harold Monro!

Falling in Love with Harold Monroe

in my closet with a flashlight

reading Childcraft Volume 1: Poems and Rhymes

I fell in love with Harold

when I was 8

reading Childcraft Volume 1: Poems and Rhymes

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

when I was 8

Give them me. / No.

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Your green glass beads on a silver ring

Give them me. / NO!

Hush, I stole them out of the moon.

Your green glass beads on a silver ring

I fell in love with Harold

Hush, I stole them out of the moon

in my closet with a flashlight

Water nymph with green glass beads, image generated with AI
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#VerseLove Day 9 – with Britt Decker of Texas – Depending on When You Met Me

Our host for the 9th day of #VerseLove2025 is Britt Decker of Houston, Texas, who inspires us to write. a poem about who we were at various times in our lives. You can read her full prompt here. Maybe you’ll come write with us today! I’ve chosen a list poem for today’s poem.

Depending on when you met me, you would have known

I was a wild preacher’s kid running amok with a

cast of characters that weren’t Southern Baptists ~

that I became them in my closet with a flashlight

obsessed with the words, the characters, the places

in Childcraft Volume 1: Poems and Rhymes

the book with the gold and pink banded spine

where they lived on pages but came alive

in me ~ and stay with me still

I’m Pirate Don Durk of Dowdee

I’m a sugar plum tree at the Lollipop Sea

I’m a little turtle climbing on the rocks

I’m Wee Willie Winkie, crying through the locks

I’m a water nymph with green glass beads

I’m a goblin in the marsh, howling in the reeds

I’m Mary, Mary, quite contrary

I’m a little puffin on an island in the sea

I’m a gypsy, a gypsy, earrings in my ears

I’m a cave boy with a spear hunting prehistoric deer

I’m the Raggedy Man with a wobble-ly calf

I’m the Ice Cream man with a cart full of laughs

I’m Young Melissa sweeping a room

I’m an astronaut….3, ….2,…..1……BOOM!

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#VerseLove Day 7 with Erica Johnson of Arkansas – Villanelle on the Vine

Erica Johnson of Arkansas is our host for Day 7 of #VerseLove 2025. She inspires us to write poems today about meanings behind favorite flowers using a villanelle. She offers this process: “I started by simply searching for the meaning behind my favorite flowers.  Once I had a list, I selected my favorite connection and started work on shaping that into a villanelle.  Because it is a closed-form poem it has pretty strict rules about rhyme (ABA) and repetition (the 1st and 3rd lines repeat throughout) – this can be challenging, but I find that is also part of the fun!” You can read Erica’s full prompt here.

I chose the Larkspur as my flower, because as a child in the village of St. Simons Island, Georgia, I enjoyed the annual craft fair, where one year in the mid 1970s I got a leather bracelet with my birth flower and name stamped into the leather. Larkspurs symbolize lightheartedness and youth, likely because they grow in the summertime when carefree days are spent away from school.

Village Hippie Villanelle

leather Larkspur bracelet for a July lass

birth month flowers stamped and snapped on thin tan straps

village craft fair hippie, barefoot in the grass

groovy girlfriends ~ running wild, full of sass

softball jerseys, cleats and shorts and backward caps

leather Larkspur bracelet for a July lass

snippy, snappy, clicky clackers ~ spheres of glass

banana seats and wheel spoke straws click and clap

village craft fair hippie, barefoot in the grass

Kissing Potion, Lip Smacker, and Sunjuns (Bass)

macrame and halter tops and treasure maps

leather Larkspur bracelet for a July lass

roller skates and unicycles need no gas

gaucho pants and go-go boots and cowboy chaps

village craft fair hippie, barefoot in the grass

childhood in a decade-era school of class

dancing queens of disco, jazz, ballet, and tap

leather Larkspur bracelet for a July lass

village craft fair hippie, barefoot in the grass

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#VerseLove Day 1 with Jennifer Jowett of Michigan: The Verse Collector

During the month of April, I’m participating in #VerseLove 2025 at http://www.ethicalela.com. Each day, a different host will lead us in a fresh prompt to inspire writing. These prompts can be used in classrooms or for personal writing development. It is my hope that you will visit the site and consider writing and sharing your own poems as we celebrate National Poetry Month together.

Today’s host is Jennifer Jowett of Michigan, who leads us in The Verse Collector prompt. You can read her full prompt inspiring us to write Cento poems here.

For my poem today, I looked no further than my old Childcraft Volume 1: Poems and Rhymes, the book that started my love of poetry as an elementary school child. I sat in a dark closet with a flashlight for hours on end, mesmerized by the reading. Here are some rearranged lines from that volume of poems that I used to create a new poem.

Stolen Childcrafted Secrets

I was going to the window

(to steal the secret of the sun)

too burning and too quick to hold

but something surely to behold

the swallows blow along the sky

the sparrows twitter as they fly

the wind is passing through

I was going to the window

(to steal the secret of the sun)

(hush, I stole them out of the moon!)

I have so much to tell!

Here are the poems from which I took the lines, in order:

Once I Saw a Little Bird, anonymous

This is My Rock – David McCord

The Falling Star – Sara Teasdale

Song of the Wake-Up-World – Countee Cullen

April – Sara Teasdale

Wind Capers – Nancy Byrd Turner

Who Has Seen the Wind? – Christina Rossetti

Repeat 1

Repeat 2

Overheard on a Salt Marsh – Harold Monro (the poem that put a spell on me for life)

March – Emily Dickinson

My original book had a pink spine and a whole different set of illustrations. This one features the same poems, but is from a different year of this set of books. One day I hope to recover the original book from an attic somewhere……..
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March 18: 2:04-2:35 Dictionary Poem

Today’s poetry prompt for the fourth day of our five Open Write days in March at http://www.ethicalela.com is to wrote a Dictionary Poem, inspired by Katrina Morrison. You can read her full prompt here.

Support

sup-port (v) – to hold up or bear the weight of

ex: the toothpicks I need for my eyelids this morning

sup-port (n) – assistance

ex: three hours on the phone with a computer technician

sup-port (adj) – the type of something

ex: having your own emotional support shark

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March 11: 10:20-10:51 Promoting The Poetry Fox

When Fran Haley of North Carolina told me about The Poetry Fox a couple of years ago, I knew this would be a treat to bring him to our town for National Poetry Month. Fran was absolutely right – he’s the coolest fox I’ve ever met. When you meet him, you give him a word. He types out a poem on a vintage typewriter, reads it to you, stamps his special paw stamp on it, and gives it to you in a presentation folder. Last year, everyone was in awe of his process!

For the evening session, The Fox will come out of costume and talk to us about how he became The Poetry Fox. He’ll share the games he played with his family as a child to build his vocabulary – – all part of his journey to becoming a poet and writer. He’ll also share how he acquired his costume and took on a new role.

We can’t wait to host him for the second year in a row in our local coffee shop on April 2nd, brought to us by the L4GA Literacy Grant in Georgia. Today during this slice of time in my work day, I’ll be distributing flyers to invite everyone to come and watch The Fox at work! Come meet The Fox and I’ll buy you a coffee or tea – -your choice!

I’m inviting YOU

Come to Pike County, Georgia

Can’t wait to meet you!

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March 9: 9:16-9:47 Clap if You Believe in Fairies!

Late-to-Rise Leprechaun: A Modified Limerick

a leprechaun sat ‘neath the shamrocks

with buckled hat, red beard, and striped socks

his faeries he queried

am I late? I’m quite w’erried

so ye be, chimed the three,

(one with book upon knee),

even fairyland can’t turn back time clocks

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya! I took a spur-o’-the-moment trip south to visit my family as my brother and sister in law and I try to help Dad tackle some tasks he can no longer do on his own. Chemotherapy has zapped all of his strength, and we (and others) continue to try to help where he will allow it – which is not nearly enough for any of us to feel satisfied, but that will take the luck o’ the Irish and a lot of prayer to change. He’s testy with us, seems skeptical, and wants to be left alone. He’s made it quite clear.

Before my brother and I visited him, I had a little extra time to check out the Ace Garden Center on St. Simons Island, Georgia, and I’d spied a little leprechaun in the robust fairy garden section that I’d planned to go back and get after visiting with Dad. I was there to look for spider plants, known for improving air quality by giving off oxygen in their transpiration process. But leave it to fairies to lure me down the aisle of wonder and intrigue. While I don’t have a dedicated fairy garden, my whole front porch is filled with fairies in their own plant container homes.

Imagine my delight when my sister in law, Jennifer, asked me to swing back by the house after visiting with Dad. She’d known just the medicine I’d needed – – a little fairy magic to cheer me up! She’d read my blog yesterday morning and beat me to the fairy section, choosing the perfect assortment of fairies – and the leprechaun – to sit on the edge of my shamrock plant as a gift – – making them so much more meaningful. Each time I look at the leprechaun, I smile. And what she didn’t know was that I would have picked the fairies dressed in green – – for an extra sprinkling of Irish fairy dust!

When I opened the gift, a black nose appeared out of nowhere – – JoJo, one of their black labs, sensed the magic and joined the fun, studying this leprechaun and his trio of fairy friends, as mesmerized as any dog has ever been. Her fixation on them – even trying at one point to take the leprechaun by the beard and run off with him – lightened the mood and made us all laugh.

Sources say that there are no female leprechauns, and that these little magical creatures are the unwanted children of the fairy family – – grouchy, closed off, and untrusting. With their stubborn, curmudgeonly, cranky attitudes, even leprechauns need someone to show them some love – trouble is, they have a hard time accepting it.

I have reasons for understanding the close relative of the leprechaun in folklore – the Clurichaun, drunk and surly beings who are known for clearing out entire wine cellars. And I must admit: I, myself, a mere human, along with my brother and sister in law, had broken into some wine over the weekend. But let’s be real – – the leprechauns drive them to it.

There comes a time in life when all children can do is clap if we believe in fairies, to envision Mary Martin as Peter Pan rallying us along, to hope the lights don’t fade too quickly.

Jo Jo checking out the leprechaun and fairy trio