Merry February, everyone. There are lots of ways of giving advice: in the form of a command, by demonstration, through constant nagging or subtle suggestion, precisely with details, broadly with general encouragement. For this month's Inklings Challenge, Molly (also our host today!) offered us a prompt she found among those at Audrey Gidman's December Poetry Advent Calendar. It reads:
Write a poem after Wendell Berry’s “Like Snow” — word for word. Choose a subject: rain, a butterfly, granite, the ocean, anything. Berry’s poem is three lines long. Break down each line. In line one, replace the word “suppose” with something else: what if; in spite of; imagine etc., replace the pronoun and the verb, replace “snow” with your chosen subject. Do the same with the second and third lines. Be sure to write an epigraph that reads “after Wendell Berry."
To that Molly added advice in the form of permissions: "I'm not sure if this is easy or not, but it is short! I'd also add that you can just be inspired by this poem and not go word for word in your substitution. Or go rogue and feel free to interpret the prompt in any way that you want! Write about snow! Get inspired by another Wendell Berry poem! Or even choose a totally different prompt from the list."
And then, interestingly, Berry's poem is a kind of advisement, quite gentle; musing, even; a conjecture:
LIKE SNOW
Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.
—Wendell Berry from “Leavings,” (Counterpoint, 2009)
What if indeed we did our one job, just that thoroughly, humbly, and then...were done with it? How might that change things? I found it a soothing challenge to transform Wendell's nugget of wisdom into something of my own.
What if indeed our progress is not fighting but flowing, is not a road but a path, is not straight and smooth but curved and not always clearly visible, and requires us to leave some of our driving behind? (Oh yeah: longanimity.) Sometimes you write the poem you yourself need without realizing it until ten days later. Also, didn't someone once say that "the personal is political"?
Furthermore, on the topics of snow and advice, here's a poem from this time last year, before I knew of Wendell's poem....
Greetings, Poetry People. 2026 is what you might call a Challenging Year so far, and some of the worst headlines are getting buried under other terrible headlines (that also require our attention. Watch this to understand again how Renee became a "legitimate target" and steel yourself for what we--specifically 99% of us--have to give up to make change).
But I'm actually here on this Friday, traditionally Climate Friday at mjlu, to make sure that I dig up some good news for you during the week when the Administration of Greed & Destruction is doing their worst for the environment. Let's clap back at the following headlines:
"Trump Withdraws U.S. from Major Global Climate Agreements On January 7, 2026, the Trump administration released a memo. It ordered the country to pull out of 66 international organizations. This includes key climate bodies like the UNFCCC (a multinational treaty) and the IPCC (the UN scientific group that reviews climate research).
“I (Pres. Trump) have considered the Secretary of State’s report and, after deliberating with my Cabinet, have determined that it is contrary to the interests of the United States to remain a member of, participate in, or otherwise provide support to the organizations listed in section 2 of this memorandum.”"
"Under Trump, U.S. Adds Fuel to a Heating Planet By pulling the United States out of the main international climate treaty, seizing Venezuelan crude oil and using government power to resuscitate the domestic coal industry while choking off clean energy, the Trump administration is not just ignoring climate change, it is likely making the problem worse."
"U.S. carbon pollution rose last year. Experts blame a cold winter, natural gas prices and data centers. Whereas U.S. emissions fell in prior years, the country spewed 2.4% more heat-trapping gases from fossil fuels in 2025 than in the year before, according to new research."
So what could there possibly be to hang on to, to celebrate? Try these nuggets:
"Over a quarter of all vehicle sales around the world are now EVs! “Plug-in cars have been comprising more than half of all sales in China and just under a third in Europe in recent months. EVs have had a sales share of more than 20% in recent months in Turkey, Thailand, and Vietnam...If you think the EV revolution is losing speed, it’s probably just a sign that your own domestic market is getting left behind.” EVs aren’t a perfect solution, of course...However, EVs today are already much, much better than fossil-fuel-powered vehicles. Unless every watt of power you use to charge the EV comes from coal, EVs produce much lower emissions and require far less mining for resources than regular internal combustion engines. And the more the grid decarbonizes, the greater the benefits."
The onslaught of environmental attacks from polluting industries and their allies in the Trump administration is not slowing down – but neither is the pace of our litigation. 1. Protecting Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument 5. Protecting the Gulf of Mexico from Offshore Drilling *Bonus Win: In Settlement of Greenwashing Lawsuit, Tyson Agrees to Stop Making Climate Claims"
"Offshore wind developer prevails in U.S. court A federal judge ruled Monday that work on a major offshore wind farm for Rhode Island and Connecticut can resume, handing the industry at least a temporary victory as President Trump seeks to shut it down."
It's not easy to find sources of good climate news, but I'll repeat and add to some of my go-to sources:
And then I came across this, for those of us suffering debilitating climate (or other "public") grief:
“Unthinkable resource hub.” "From Unthinkable, a “nonprofit tackling the mental health crisis within the climate crisis,” this rich library of resources offers – among many other things – personalized help for individuals who want to move through distress into focused action."
And now, the poetry part of our program today: the Poets.org Treehouse Climate Poem Prizewinner for 2025.
A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem Rachel Dillon
but in this poem nothing dies.
Alone in the poem, I make myself brave. No—I show brave to my body, take both to the ocean.
Come hurricane, come rip current, come toxic algal bloom.
In March, I drift past the estuary to watch an eight-foot dolphin lap the Mill River
like a cat pacing a bathtub, sick and disoriented.
Biologists will unspool her empty intestines, weigh her gray cerebellum. She swam a great distance to die
alone. I’m sorry—I lied. I can’t control what lives or dies. I need a place
to stow my brain. To hold each moment close as a sand flea caught in my knuckle hairs.
Please, someone— tell me a poem can coax
oil from a sea bird’s throat. Tell me what to do with my hands—my hands—
what can my hands do now?
Thanks to our host Jan at bookseed studio for bringing us all the inspiring MLKJr goodness today, and
Have I ever been here before? Realizing on Saturday morning that on Friday I morning I had not given one inkling of thought to the fact that it was Poetry Friday, the first one of the new month? The New Year?
I'll go and look, but ... I don't think so. And I haven't posted since the first Friday of November, and I haven't really written a n y t h i n g since Dec. 3, and (all join in) THAT'S OKAY. But it is odd that all of this has happened without intent, giving me a strong feeling of flakiness. (I once wrote a poem about the horror of being a flaky person, which came out like this,* so some part of me knows better.)
The thing is, while all of you were busily linking your Poetry Friday post with our hostess with the mostess Catherine, I WAS in fact thinking my first OLW thoughts in years, looking for the word that will hold me during this transitional time as Fiona and I gear up to start, in late August, spending 9 months of every year in England, returning each summer to Silver Spring. More on the word later.
First up is the Inklings challenge, set by said hostess Catherine, and based on a little poem by further Inkling Mary Lee (who also rounded us all up and has provided the list of hosts and code to feed the HTML dragons--thank you, Mary Lee, for helping us run). We are to write a little poem that begins “This is January” or “January.” I especially enjoyed the first line of her follow-up to the poem she posted on December 12:"This is December, as much or more than ..."
So...
This is January
This is January, as much or more than cleaning up the confetti, putting away the decorations, assessing the year gone by, prognosticating the year to come:
the pleasurable stillness of waking, for once, as the low, slow sun is already slatting the wall; of taking up a book instead of a handful of screed and screen; of scrambled eggs in bed and a moderate walk in the wind.
May nothing trying cross my door,
on this first of January at least.
draft (c) HM 2026
And now, my word for 2026: l o n g a n i m i t y
"Longanimity is a word with a long history. It came to English in the 15th century from the Late Latin adjective longanimis, meaning "patient" or "long-suffering." Longanimis, in turn, derives from the Latin combination of longus ("long") and animus ("soul"). Longus is related to English's long and is itself an ancestor to several other English words, including longevity ("long life"), elongate ("to make longer"), and prolong ("to lengthen in time"). Now used somewhat infrequently in English, longanimity stresses the character of one who, like the figure of Job in the Bible, endures prolonged suffering with extreme patience."
Now, to be clear, my personal trials are nothing compared with Job's, but do I tend to cause myself quite a lot of internal suffering? Why, yes--yes I do. So I have chosen this word over "patience" (a thing I already know that I do not excel in) and over something more like "optimism" or "faith," because it's a quirky word that is fun to say, and because it reminds me that my soul and I am playing a long game, that if I can hang back a little and see what develops, rather than anxiously leaning in and attempting to execute items from my many lists before their time, things are likely to work out fine. It makes me feel wiser than I am wont to feel.
Thanks to Catherine for the challenge, to Mary Lee again for the starting point and our community's bonne continuation, and to all of you for being here, rain or shine. Read what they and my pals Margaret, Linda and Molly have wrought here, and be well!
Greetings, Poetry People, and welcome to this aggressively-arriving December! I don't celebrate Advent in the traditional sense, but I'm very aware of it all the same. When the first Sunday of Advent is also the first DAY of December a person can feel a little rushed, and when the first week of December brings freeze and snow (unusual for these parts) a person could feel a little chilly, too. Not to mention the similarly aggressive DARKNESS.
Luckily we have poetry to keep things warm and bright, and this month I offered the Inklings a simple challenge: "Address an item of your clothing."
Once upon a time in 2019 I was at NCTE, striding the halls of the Baltimore Convention Center, and a woman passed before me wearing an item of clothing that I literally had to reach out and grab. (I hope it was more of a reach-out-and-unaggressively-tap-her-shoulder, but I was very excited so I can't be sure.)
In my hurry I skipped the civil preambles of "Excuse me" and went straight to "Where did you get that DRESS?" She overlooked my abruptness because she was also a teacher in a hurry; she told me where (and this post is sponsored in spirit by woman-owned internet merchant Svaha); I arrived at my NCTE session and immediately ordered it using my phone.
And so began a lengthy love story. I wore this dress for the umpteenth time just yesterday while teaching an ekphrastic poetry workshop to 150 6th graders, and I was wearing it in November when I wrote poems of address, advice and apology with 5th graders...which of course made we want to write a Poem of A Dress. THIS dress!--although my version is a slightly different style.
Hee hee. Incidentally, this poem owes some of its vocabulary and figures to the 5th graders of Mrs. Twigg's Class, who helped me workshop it when Mrs. Twigg and I critiqued each other's poems by way of demonstrating a response protocol for sharing poems with a partner. (Mrs. Twigg's poem was also great fun, full of hand-and-heartwarming "Brewed Wisdom" for the barista in all of us.)
As you can see, though, this dress is not well-suited for warmer, more colorful months, in my opinion, so in March I ordered a second writerly Svaha dress, with a design called "Botanical Library." I wore it for the first time on April 22 to a protest at the Supreme Courth about opting out of LGBTQ+ books in my district's classrooms--the perfect symbolic combination for Earth Day and Representation in Books!
I wonder what items of clothing our other Inkling friends will address? Check them out below, and thanks to our distinctly UNaggressive host Irene at Live Your Poem for rounding us up today!
November already?! Oof. Time for another Inklings challenge, thanks to Linda Mitchell. "The prompt comes from Ethical ELA’s September 2025 Open Write by Kelsey Bigelow: “What is the happiest thing you’ve ever tasted?
I'm smack in the middle of my first-ever travel residency AND my laptop spectacularly crashed and burned halfway through yesterday, so I have to skip some of the recommended rambling freewrite and go for the InstaDraftTM...
Who's a Boss?
(dedicated to the 5th graders of Williamsport ES)
You are choosing words that make
the poem sound good to our ears and feel good in our mouths.
I see you over there whispering your words to yourself, before you write them down, as you write them down, after you write them down. I hear you testing, trying, timid or torrential; your rhymes are raggedy, your similes leave us smiling; your fifth-grade flavor is farm-fresh &
aura-matic! and nothing tastes happier to my weary ears
than you reading your poem
out loud in the middle of a
random Thursday afternoon.
Thanks to LPS for hosting us today with a little anticipatory Flurrying, Floating and Flying!
Finally--do speak up if you'll be at NCTE! I'm moderating a panel on nonfiction poetry with Marilyn Singer, Carole Weatherford, Carol Hinz and our own Margaret Simon. I wouldn't want to miss hanging out with any of you!
Greetings, Poetry People! Every now and then I one of my poems get to participate in a unique project. The latest of these is "Brownies: Baked-In Math," which was selected by Heidi Bee Roemer for her STEAM Powered Poetry list! That makes me an "Esteamed Poet" (hee hee), in great company with Poetry Friday friends Robyn Hood Black and Linda Kulp Trout and many other accomplished poets.
This poem was originally written for a Lee Bennett Hopkins anthology, A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MATH, but he selected another of my poems for that book, which I still have hope will appear. Lee's esteemed fingerprints are on "Brownies" too. I'm excited to share all the great promo materials "the other Heidi" and her STEAM TEAM have developed. Here's a video overview.
The poems are written for a grade-school audience, have STEAM themes, and are available for older students to turn into videos which they can submit to a contest, with cash prizes for the winners! Find links to the contest poems here: https://steampoweredpoetry.com/contest/poetry-packet-download/
And now, here's my poem!
Brownies:
Baked-In Math
We wait until the pan is cool.
It’s time to cut them into squares.
How many across? How many down?
Hungry brother says, “Who cares?
“Just make them big!” he says. I try.
Dividing in my mind, I see
a tic-tac-toe board in our pan:
I’m multiplying three by three.
Nine big brownies--oddly nine.
I visualize another scene:
four rows of four instead, each square
much smaller. That would be sixteen
little brownies in the pan—
TOO small, I’m thinking to myself.
What about three rows, four columns?
That would make the product twelve...
An even number in the pan,
not too big and not too small.
I cut twelve rectangles with care
and then…we eat them all!
Thanks to Heidi Bee and good luck to all you contest entrants--let's make this video 🎵MATHEMATICALLY DELICIOUS!🎵
Greetings, Poetry People! I'm coming to you today from my first "travel gig" in little Williamsport, MD. It's a 75-minute drive from home, so I'm actually spending some nights away in the course of this residency, which includes dates in Oct, Nov and Jan for 5th, 4th and 1st grades at Williamsport ES.
Being able to go hither and yon to teach POETRY is a dream I had only begun to enact when I started this blog in 2008. I had returned from a year in France with my family (where I had, in fact, conducted a couple of workshops at the American Library and at an international school), but 2008 was the restart of my public school teaching career after teaching part-time in a nursery school while my kids were young. Here's a post in which I explain my blog's title to Daisy, then age 9.
SQUEEZE had been published, PUMPKIN BUTTERFLY was in the works, and I was still part-time, which would have allowed plenty of time to write the next book--if I hadn't gotten distracted by the state of school in my district. My good neighbor and I had blithely been sending our kids thinking it was one of the Very Best School Systems in the country, but when we both began teaching therein that fall, we looked at each other over Halloween costume making and said, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." Our response was to devote the next 3 years to spearheading a long and arduous public charter school project which in the end was a most spectacular failure. Do I regret it now? Yes and no. At the time it seemed like a worthy investment in offering a wider range of
educational options in our county, and I met a ton of cool people, and old friends who trusted me got on board with time, treasure and talent, and I DID write a pretty good book. The application was 375 pages long and it was built around POEMS that expressed our vision. On the other hand, without really realizing what I was doing, I threw myself off the kidlit poet career path and hardly even attempted to submit further manuscripts until---well, last month!
In 2010 I went full-time in a kindergarten classroom (4 years), which led to the OIK series at my juicy little universe: Overheard in Kindergarten. In those days I could actually remember verbatim the interesting things the kids said in the course of the day and then write poems from them, even blog about them! Then came 2nd grade (4 years), and then PreK (3 years). In the years I've been writing this blog, I have taught approximately 340 kids for 10 months of their lives, plus probably another 500 or so in shorter-term, part-time workshop situations, either after school or during school residencies. It's not thousands, but it's a good number.
A few more numbers:
*I've written a total of 862 posts in these 17 years.
*862/17 = 50.7 posts per year--that's nearly one a week for 884 weeks. Gosh.
*Of course, some years have had way more: currently 2016 is the winner with 72 posts, which included one of the several National Poetry Month projects where I did almost daily posts.
*The year with the fewest posts (not counting the first year and the current year) is 2024 with only 29 posts, down from an already reduced 39 in 2023. I've moved gradually to a twice-a-month posting schedule, perhaps because building the box to contain my WHISPERshout activities turned out to be more fun but also way more time-consuming than teaching inside the prefabricated box of a classroom!
During these years I've also had the opportunity to slip quite a few individual poems into quite a few anthologies, journals, magazine articles, newspaper columns and other projects, both adult and kidlit. I'm always thrilled to respond to an anthology call, y'all!
The latest of these one-off projects is my poem "Brownies: Baked-In Math," which was selected by Heidi Bee Roemer for her STEAM Powered Poetry list! That makes me an "Esteamed Poet" (hee hee), in great company with some of our Poetry Friday friends: Robyn Hood Black and Linda Kulp Trout. This poem was originally written for a Lee Bennett Hopkins anthology, A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MATH, but he selected another poem for the book, which I still have hope will appear. Lee's esteemed fingerprints are on "Brownies" too. I'm excited to share all the great promo materials "the other Heidi" and her STEAM TEAM have developed. Here's a video overview.
The poems are written for a grade-school audience, have STEAM themes, and are available for high school and college students to turn into videos which they can submit to a contest, with cash prizes for the winners! Find links to the contest poems here: https://steampoweredpoetry.com/contest/poetry-packet-download/
And now, a few shout-outs to the folks who have accompanied me on this journey since the early days:
*Robin Galbraith, my very first commenter, AKA A Nice Gal AKA Rowena Eureka, parent of a kid in my first nursery school class, member of my earliest critique group, fellow climate activist and now DAILY protestor in downtown DC, who really walks the walk as well as writing the talk;
*Laura Purdie Salas, who commented on my very first Poetry Friday post on March 27, 2009 and has been a deep resource on all things writing career since even before the blog;
*Tabatha and Laura Shovan (my local friends and champions), Linda KT and Mary Lee who all have been reading and commenting encouragingly for 16 of those 17 years;
*gratitude to Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, early appreciators of my work and supporters of so many new poets; Marilyn Singer, SCBWI mentor who invited me to ALA Poetry Blasts in 2010 and 2011 (and with whom I'll present at NCTE25), and Tricia "Miss Rumphius" Stohr-Hunt, who encouraged me with a lengthy interview in 2010;
*and of course, to the Inklings--Margaret, Catherine, Linda, Molly and Mary Lee--for making me a better poet bit by bit over almost TEN years now. 💞
And that's about all of this horn-tooting reminiscence that any of us can take for now! I really am grateful for this invention of self-published technology, for the best parts of the INTER-NET (think about what that actually means and embrace it). I'll close now with the ritual reposting of my bloggiversary acrostic:
Bloggiversary Poem, repaired
All threads and trains,
No rules, restraints;
No due dates, deadlines, or demands.
I get to choose. It's in my hands:
Voice, vocabulary,venom or valentine--
Each and every muse is mine.
Reach out deep or dive in wide; noisy soapbox, soft aside;
Sampling the past or hewing the new
As I talk to myself or write to you.
Revels, relations, revelations live here
Year after year after year.
original HM 2016; redraft 2025
Thanks finally to our host Patricia, who joins the revels, relations and revelations with some Reverie!
Blog Benediction:
May you all enjoy the same blog satisfaction as I have had the good fortune to do!
Yep, I've been blogging here at my juicy little universe for
SEVENTEEN YEARS!
But the celebration will have to be next week because I am just too loaded this week to do it justice. Thanks to all of you who have accompanied me along the way, and I'll see you next week with some numbers...
.webp)
