cybils poetry finalists I

Oops!  My series highlighting the 7 finalists for the 2015 Cybils Poetry Award is...not allowed!  As a new judge, I didn't realize that I shouldn't post anything at all.  So I've now removed the two offending posts, and we must all wait until the official winner announcement on February 14 to read reviews and critiques by me and the other judges.

However...the chilly nature of one of the finalists put me in mind of an own poem from Pumpkin Butterfly:  Poems from the Other Side of Nature.  I shared it with my students this week after a very interesting discussion about Epiphany in the Christian story and the question "What year was Jesus born?"

Epiphany Forest

On January 6th, when the presents

and carols and cookies are over,

there’s one last thing to do. 

Just as the Wise Men finally arrive

we undecorate, unlight, strip away the gold star.

On the morning of the 7th,

at the bare gray schoolyard

one by one our dying, drying trees,

still in their stands, are planted

among the cold poles of the equipment.

And on the 8th, when the

first snow finally arrives

we fly out onto the playground

faster than the flakes are falling

to marvel at our frosted Epiphany Forest.

©Heidi Mordhorst

                             

Please join Tabatha for some more of the muscle and grace of great poetry--she's got the Roundup at The Opposite of Indifference today.

deeper wisdom: what the knife knows

Illness precluded a Friday post, but a visit to the doctor (combined with 72 hours forced rest) has led to a slight improvement and a Saturday post.  In response to the Ditty of the Month Club challenge hosted by Michelle Heidenrich Barnes and inspired by Joyce Sidman's work in Winter Bees, I offer the following.  Like Liz Steinglass, I opted to explore the wisdom of an everyday object rather than of nature, and I took a little liberty with the form as well.


What Does the Knife Know?

What does the knife know?
    Red tautness of tomato's skin.
        Onion's shallot's garlic's kin.
    Juicy slick of vitamin.   
        Jolt of pit or stone within.

What does the knife know?
    Tender coarseness of the crumb.
        Whack of steel on boarden drum.
    Whorl and loop don't armor thumb.
        Better bleeding cut than numb.

Heidi Mordhorst 2015
all rights reserved
  
I have only just realized that knife goes with spoon.  I guess a fork poem is on its way...and is anyone else having trouble, as they read these deeper wisdom poems, screening out repeated mental blarings of "What does the fox say?"

"what buds?"

My son is 8 and although he knows a lot about the world, I'm sometimes surprised at what I assume he knows and doesn't. We had another 2" of snow overnight on Tuesday and therefore (somewhat absurdly) a 2-hour delay on Wednesday, so we had time to gear up and head out to the bus stop half-an-hour early. It wasn't great snowball snow--fine and flaky and extra-sparkly in the sun--so we found other ways to amuse ourselves, like shaking snow off branches (and is there anything more beautiful than dark branches frosted in sparkling snow against a blue, blue sky?) .

"Look at all the buds," I said. "They know spring will come again even though it doesn't feel like it now." I bothered to say it out loud because this knowledge added to my hopeful, sunny, fresh-air feeling. Duncan looked up and said, "What buds?" You know, like he'd never heard of buds. I pointed out the little textured teardrops at the end of each twig on the--actually I don't even know what kind of tree we were standing under. "Each of those is a tiny beginning of a leaf, just waiting for the weather to warm up." "Really? Cool," he replied, and went to jump daringly into the snow from a wall which is rumored to contain a snakehole.

There was time when I eschewed exclamation marks as a sign of weak writing in need of bolstering by flashy punctuation. Frank O'Hara changed my mind about that (and has inspired many others), and see how WCW uses one surprisingly! in this otherwise softspoken poem. I think it renders perfectly the feeling we have when we can cross something big off our to-do list, relax and store up wisdom. Hm. I miss that feeling...

Winter Trees
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

Enjoy Poetry Friday today with Laura Purdie Salas at Writing the World for Kids--and congratulations indeed to Joyce Sidman for her Newbery Honor medal--it'll look great on the cover of Dark Emperor. Go Poetry!