Poetry Friday

The Round-up today is at A Teaching Life.

BUILD A POEM is the poster name for my upcoming poetry workshop for kids. We’re going to use Patricia MacLachlan’s beautiful book Word After Word After Word as a springboard to create our own poems. Ms. Mirabel talked about the importance of landscape, so we’ll start there. Nephew Mike Beane photographed this lovely tree across from the Maine home we both grew up in.

A dear furniture maker friend donated wood blocks and scraps. We’ll talk about this wood and how once it was growing as a tree. We’ll brainstorm what the tree’s landscape might have looked like.

Poem #1 Be the tree. On the wood, write a poem showing what you saw, felt and heard in your landscape.

We’ll brainstorm words and phrases for our own personal landscapes.

Poem # 2 Turn the wood over. Write a poem that makes the reader feel your landscape.

My own landscape poem:

Sandpit

Warm sand sifts through my hand.

I sculpt curved roads,

plant trees of sweet fern,

then climb the pine to my platform

and snug my back against bark.

Year after year, I bury broken dolls.

The last hole I dig is for my dog.