Raccontino Poems

My friend Margaret Simon of Louisiana is always inspiring me to try new forms. We write with several overlapping writing groups. Margaret hosts Poetry Friday and This Photo Wants to Be a Poem, organizes Spiritual Thursdays, blogs with Slice of Life, hosts and writes for EthicalELA during #VerseLove and the monthly Open Writes, and is a member of the Stafford Challenge. She has also published several books, and we presented a poetry writing workshop together in April at the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. She recently posted that the Poetry Sisters had written Raccontino poems, which are couplets of any number where the even-numbered lines end on the same rhyme and the title is expressed in the last words of the odd-numbered lines. I raise a glass to my writing friend Margaret today. You can follow her on her blog Reflections on the Teche.

Family Vacations

packing suitcases ~ memories to make
experiencing life before we leave

there is no better way to spend our time
than taking a trip ~ a welcome reprieve

from routine demands, a fortress built for
placing importance in what we believe

things we can only learn as we travel
(like setting aside our personal peeves)

savoring now, embracing family
holding presence as belonging we weave

interlocking fingers: togetherness
fastening futures ~ no regrets to grieve

Tea and Writing With Friends

Unexpected kindnesses can happen anytime, in the most needed ways. A couple of weeks ago, fellow slicer and friend Barb Edler of Iowa reached out to see if I wanted to be part of a small group she was putting together for The Stafford Challenge of daily writers in our second year of writing a poem a day for one full year. Each of us writes in three common writing groups and have met in person to make presentations at NCTE. We keep in touch, and I’ve often thought that my friends in the midwest and west coast and I share deeper connections than friends sitting next to me each day at work – – because we share the bond of kinship through writing. And I’m so thankful for this, because along with Denise Krebs and Glenda Funk, we found we were kindred spirits all seeming to need a lift right about now. Each of us shared a poem via Zoom that we’ve written recently and found a common thread – a numbness, disbelief, sadness about what is happening in our world with its shocking politics, heartbreaking plane crashes, and other woeful wreckage.

There are no words to capture the deep feeling of comfort that comes when you sit with friends, near or far, with a cup of tea and spend time sharing writing. I’m thanking each of you today, because that’s what slicing does, too. It brings us together to share what is foremost on our minds and hearts and keeps us in touch with what is going on in our lives across the globe. I love having my gardening friends, my RV bloggers, my travel buddies, my fellow grandmothers who share amazing ideas, fellow readers and birdwatchers and more. Thank you for being a writer in my life.

I’m sharing my tricube (three stanzas, three lines per stanza, three syllables per line) that I shared last night (below). I’m also making plans for March slicing – – I’ve sectioned out the waking hours of a typical day, and I plan to write a poem for every 31-minute time slot about something happening during that time, just to feel the real-lifeness of each moment, just because there can be deep comfort in things as simple as stirring honey into a cup of hot green tea and accepting that it’s okay not to want to read the tea leaves.

Photo by Leeloo The First on Pexels.com

I don’t know

I don’t know

what to say

words fail me

I don’t know

what to do

verbs fail me

I don’t know

what to think

thoughts fail me