Margaret Simon, our host for VerseLove Day 22, lives in Louisiana.
Margaret inspires us to write prose poems of emotion today. She explains, “A prose poem looks like prose; however, there are poetic elements that set it apart from a paragraph. There is a rhythm of poetry within the prose-like lines. Contemplate an invitation to an emotion. Write it out in prose. Let your words flow out like the water from a teapot.”
Click, Click, Click, Ding
….at the table with The Poetry Fox ~ his vintage typewriter clicks like my mind, wondering how he works this magic. Writing poems in a minute, pounding out letters, words, thoughts, feelings. Bringing tears of sentiment, laughter of imaginings, words and images to life. Like a heartbeat, rhythmic and steady, not skipping a beat until the poem is complete and he stamps his paw print, reads the gift aloud, winding my joy-filled heart right into the ribbon of those keys I can still clearly hear…..
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.
Dr. Sarah J. Donovan is the founder of Ethical ELA, a community for teacher-writers, and a 2024 Fellow for the Genocide Education Project. A former middle school English teacher and author, she advocates for humanizing literacy practices, genocide education, and poetry as witness. Her work bridges pedagogy, justice, and storytelling.
Sarah inspires us to write poems in recognition of the past and in celebration of the Armenian people, their voices, and their enduring culture. You can read her full prompt here. I’m sharing a celebration pantoum.
6:20-6:51 p.m.: My peace rituals are more necessary these days than they’ve ever been before.
Is it because I’m older?
Or because life is busier?
Or because the world feels so different today than it did yesterday?
Some evenings, I take a long walk with the dogs. Other evenings, I light candles. Some nights, I soak in a hot bath. Most every afternoon or evening, I make a pot of hot green tea and my husband and I indulge with local honey and a flavored herb blend. There is nothing that compares to the feeling of togetherness and unwinding over steam rising from a cup. When the world is cold, there is warmth in togetherness.
I take an afternoon break at work usually around 3:30 for about 10 minutes to stretch my legs and walk outdoors around the building in the sunshine when it’s warm. My body and soul need the Vitamin D. I need the release of noise and stress to take to the silence. I’m reminded of Margaret Simon’s recent post on Notes from a Walk inspired by Denise Kreb’s post on her own morning walk and take some mental notes for a blog post later. I notice the flowers, the birdsong, the hidden Pirate Trail so perfect for a solitary walk to indulge for just a few minutes in the name of what little sanity and peace of mind exists right now.
This walk reminds me of our visit to Gibbs Gardens last year, where we took in the breathtaking views of daffodils and tulips. It makes me want to go back again. They’ve just opened for the season on March 1. I pull up the ticket information and the hours, starting to plan the trip in my mind. I check out the Bloom Update calendar and admire the photos of the same daffodils I’d seen last year that were recently photographed, smiling their friendly, welcoming springtime smiles already this year.
This weekend? Next weekend? What’s on tap for us? I text my husband: Let’s go back to Gibb’s Gardens! Which weekend works for you?
And then, across the parking lot in the row of pines, I see the familiar ghostly cloud of yellow spores signaling me from the tip top branches, sweeping through the needles and swooping down, taking my inner springtime joy with it as one giant corkscrewing wave spirals in a hurried flurry to the ground. My weekend dreams pummel in that same way inside my heart, and I can feel it.
I cover my nose and mouth and return to the less-spored indoors, turning the personal air purifier in my cubicle to the highest setting, abandoning all ambition to make the drive to Gibbs Gardens until after pollen season and penciling a note to myself to tape to my keys: remember to dig out the NeilMed sinus rinse bottle before bed.
Gibbs Gardens trip plans
come to a screeching-hard halt
in this pollen count
Today’s Pollen Count in Pike County, Georgia is 184 grains per cubic meter of air……..
There’s a small park about 1/2 mile down the highway from my office, and on spring days when the pollen isn’t enough to push me over the edge, I like to get a 6″ Blimpie sub and eat half of it as I picnic in the park. There are covered picnic tables, and parking is just steps away. It’s a perfect way to take a break from the office and get a little Vitamin D. It’s also a quiet place to take my journal and write.
When Covid hit and we took to the camper for weekend getaways, we re-discovered the inner peace of picnics as we spent more time outdoors in nature. We didn’t even need a table. We took our camp chairs and sat by a lake or on a mountaintop and let the dogs play as we spent time doing nothing but relaxing. I decided at that time to find way to picnic in the middle of a workday to keep the perspective. Nature has a way of doing that. And that’s when I found the park near my office.
No one ever thinks about going here, tucked away as it is off the highway. Sometimes I come with a group of friends, but I also love having it all to myself. It’s the best way to spend a lunch hour any day, but especially on Fridays.
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.
One of the most beautiful things about a writing group is that you often know the people in your circles better than those who work ten feet from you every day. And when your groups intersect so that you slice together, take on The Stafford Challenge together, and write poems at Ethicalela together too, you look forward to your small group Zoom times where you write and share face-to-face from the east coast to the west coast and two states in between.
That’s what happened last night. I didn’t join a small group for The Stafford Challenge last year, but when Barb Edler suggested that we form our own small group with more flexible scheduling, she took the lead in setting up our Zoom meetings so that Denise Krebs, Glenda Funk and I could all meet to write, share, and keep in touch. So in our Zoom last night, Glenda introduced a prompt that invited us to write definition poems. A special thanks to Glenda for the inspiration – and to Denise, Barb, and Glenda for suggesting a better ending for the second definition! Cheers to writing friends who inspire us and keep us writing in community. Since I’m slicing through increments of time throughout the day, I chose to write about my cubicle today.
cubicle (n.) – 1. an open place where I always feel I’m being watched. There’s no privacy here with two on-screen llamas, a whispering plant, the eyes of the family photos, everyone who walks by, the general webinar population, the parking lot parents who can see in the windows, and probably, probably cameras everywhere. 2. a limiting space to sit and work the day away but never, never my home away from home.
Welcome to the first day of the 2025 Slice of Life Writing Challenge, where bloggers post each day of the month. You can find the home page with links to blogs across the world here. I’m writing about things that happen in time increments this year, described in yesterday’s post.
Common Threads 