haiku catch-up

Holiday travel this year--all the way to Seaford, England, courtesy of Grandma Treeze. I've just about managed to stick with the daily #haikuforhealing, which also serves as a sort of December diary.  Here's what those not following on Twitter may have missed.

12.29
each morning we wake
to see what star is fallen
sky blues anyway

..and Carrie and Debbie and...

12.28
south downs: more like ups
here at the seven sisters
mutton on the hoof

 

12.27
chilli pickle
thali platter mutton curry:
brighton highlight

12.26
boxing day:
let's celebrate by letting
everyone out

12.25
misty, moisty
Christmas Day--sea breeze
whips the walled garden

12.24
airplane universe:
chorus of voices
fails to reach Syria

singers

12.23
airport universe:
some of everyone shining
in long weary lines

 

12.21
revelling late
the shortest day becomes
the longest day ever

12.19
rogue elector
I *choose* to shop at the discount store
at rush hour

          Electoral College


12.18
haiku harmony
arranging layered words we
rage and marvel on

Reflections on the Teche  and read the comments

12.17
winter traditions:
devised by peasants with no
fields to plow, no school?

          (The more I wanted to just sleep from 6pm until 7am, the more there was to do...)


I'm posting early this week because we'll be busy overnight with visiting rellies.  Thanks to  Donna at Mainely Write for hosting.  See you in 2017!

Time this morning only to wish everyone a bright Solstice--which I described to 2nd graders as the winter holiday we can ALL acknowledge:  light the dark, green the grey, warm the frigid world!  (The northern hemisphere, anyway.)

This week's microprocessing...

12.16
on the 14th, seared,
I lay down rows of cookies
iced with salty stains

          Newtown Anniversary


 12.15
strange light spreads
in my dark December room--
oh! it's the fat friendly moon

12.14
welcome all
the world is spicy
brown and sweet

12.13
a player, ready
palms and feathers greased
exxonus rex

Rex Tillerson

12.12
who needs intelligence?
you get this, Mike--
I'm busy trying on suits

          The President's Daily Brief

12.11
note to self:
hurrying towards everything
I hurt someone


Today the round-up is with my pal Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference.  A visit to her blog is always intriguing, always uplifting (slothlove!), always healing.

#haiku (and book launches) for healing

My effort to respond creatively to the news of the world continues;  you can read about how Mary Lee started it all here.  You're invited to scroll down to the previous week's minimalist commentaries --and of course, you're invited to join in.  It wasn't clear to me at first, but the tiny discipline of slowing down to craft a response (rather than just banging the steering wheel and yelling at the radio) has been empowering.

12.9

first college news
we both prefer denial
to rejection

And from yesterday:

12.8

gold star winks out
leaving a long bright trail
holding in orbit


Joining in this project are all the brave women below; I hope they will pardon me when, during the week, all I can manage is to Like their Tweeted haiku.  It's good to work alongside you all!

          Mary Lee Hahn at Poetrepository
          Michelle Heidenrich Barnes at Today's Little Ditty
          Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche
          Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
          Buffy Silverman at Buffy's Blog
          Jone Rush MacCulloch at DeoWriter
          Diane Mayr, posted on Thursdays at Random Noodling
          Julie Johnson at Raising Readers and Writers
          Catherine Flynn at Reading to the Core
          Carol Varsalona at Beyond LiteracyLink
          Carol Wilcox at Carol's Corner
          Julieanne Harmatz tweeting @jarhartz          Linda Baie at Teacher Dance


Our hostess with the postest is Jone at Check It Out.  She reminds us that haiku fits nicely on a postcard. And now, in other news...

I was delighted to join Jacqueline Jules, Marty Rhodes Figley and Laura Murray on Dec. 1st for a holiday book launch at One More Page in Arlington, VA (what a delightful place).  Here we are, festive and fierce with a bunch of fun books for holiday giving and receiving.  Each book you see earns its place on the bookshelf, but if I may reveal all my biases:  every home with children needs a copy of One Minute till Bedtime!

12.7

a fine kettle of
hawks we have here,
rising on hot air

hawks

and also


generals and majors
drone on with military decision
just following orders, sir


Here's my inspiration, deceptively upbeat, by the ever-clever XTC.  The song remains a stroke of genius, although the video is goofy--can you spot a really famous British entrepreneur?

*************************************************************

12.6

looks like pizza, smells
like pizza--but let's shoot it
just to be safe


Comet Ping-Pong
I have a ton to say about this one, primarily that in order to effectively distinguish fact from fake it helps have to have an excellent grip on metaphor.

12.5

sing on
little bird of Aleppo
fly safe



Bana al-Abed

12.4

loud and solid
an army of rock stands, chants,
sends the snake around

12.3

so dam busy in
December--maybe this
will save me some tooth






"Beaver Wreaks Havoc in Maryland Dollar Store"

#haikuforhealing

Mary Lee said: "My creative spirit, who has been sitting out on the porch with her head between her knees for the last couple of weeks, looked up and nodded. Yes, that seems right, she said. A response to the news of the day, shared in the concise metaphorical form of the haiku."

Thus daily  #haikuforhealing in December was born.

My creative spirit exclaimed, "Dang, that sounds like a good idea! News, concise, metaphor, daily.  You can do this!"   And also: "Isn't Mary Lee wise, brave, and planful?"

So here we go, with no promises that I can manage every day.
*****************************************
12.1

fire, flood, tornado
no one says
"punishment from God"

12.2

skies clear: no dove.

on the ground jackass

brays at mad dog

Hmmmm.  Those are perhaps not extremely healing.  Let me try again....

12.2 

stone soup simmers
villagers add their vegetables
to the deep pot of Friday


And here are last week's warm-ups, featured on Today's Little Ditty by Michelle:

11.28

not by hiding
from the world but by living
widely in it

11.27

refuge & solace:
today I don't turn on
the news


11.26

gathering light
around the long table
let's take this outside

One Minute till Bedtime Blog Tour!

To help celebrate the release of this beautiful book, contributor Jackie Hoskings has organized a blog tour!  Please join the poets on December 1st as we share a one-minute poem that didn't quite make it into the book.

Find her round-up here, and enjoy!

<poem>

singing gratitude

Being a "general optimist," my reactions to the current state of the world lean resolutely towards whatever there is to appreciate, whatever there is to celebrate, whatever is good.  In that spirit, today I offer some grateful words I sang to my children at bedtime, composed as a more-than-Christian variation on a hymn tune my mother sang to me.  They're intended to be both soothing and, the next morning, rousing.

There is so much to be thankful for, so many blessings to fight for.

Hymn at Bedtime

All praise to thee, bright world, this night

For all the wonders of the light.

Keep me, oh, keep me till sunrise

Beneath thy deep and endless skies.

Thanks for the trees and for the birds;

Thanks for the silence and the words;

Thanks for the blue and for the green;

Thanks for the places I have been.

Thanks for the water and the wind;

Thanks for the drum and violin;

Thanks for the honey on my bread;

Thanks for this place to lay my head.

And when tomorrow comes the day

I’ll wake and shake the dark away,

Greeting each creature of the earth

With gifts of warmth and strength and mirth.

        (c) Heidi Mordhorst 2001
 


The Thanksgiving round-up is with Carol at Carol's Corner.  I'm thankful for all of you who make this community for all of us.

#ncte16

I'm coming to you from balmy Atlanta this week, where Mary Lee Hahn and I will be presenting later today a session called "Risking Writing," along with Dr. Shanetia Clark of Salisbury University and author Patricia Hruby Powell.  At the heart of this session is the writing of a poem brainstormed by Shanetia, drafted by Mary Lee, and revised by me.  Patricia will supply inspirational commentary. Do check back in to see what we came up with!

...And here we are, back from a really terrific collaboration between presenters--all the more terrific because none of us knew all the rest of us before we met in our session room!  That in itself was part of the risk.

Here's the photo--by Mary Lee, of course--that we offered as a prompt.

After brief introductions, Patricia kicked us off by emphasizing the fun in writing, reviewing some of the  techniques she uses, like keeping a bank of verbs related to her subject handy.  She spoke about emotion as the key both to authentic writing, and about its role in the teacher-student relationship.

                                                  Here we all are getting started.







Next, Shanetia brainstormed and Mary Lee drafted based on her ideas.  A document camera let participants watch this work as we all commented on the process.




















Participants also brainstormed and drafted.  Then I narrated a process of revision, reading aloud to find the music in the words and also to hear where the emotion was coming through.

 








 Likewise, our intrepid crew of participants had a go at revision.  It was a lot more difficult to come to a conclusion
with our shared poem than we expected, and the feeling of being vulnerable in front of an audience--as our students are asked to be every day--was palpable!

Our poem may not yet be finished, but here it is.  You can follow the whole process by going to #riskingwriting on Twitter, where we hope that others will share their efforts at writing in front of their students!

                        

The Voice of the Vegetables

We don't get to pick
the basket we land in--
pepper with eggplant with squash.

Grown apart, at market
we tumble together
on a background of red--
color and spice and crunch.

Unity is not a concession.
Stand, then speak, then lead.
         
(c) Shanetia Clark, Mary Lee Hahn, Heidi Mordhorst 2016

Here were the few slides of our presentation:

The round-up today is with Brenda at Friendly Fairy Tales.  It's not much of a risk just joining in our friendly Fridays, but letting the poetry take you--that's riskier.

november kaboom, take 2

Last Friday I wrote with joy to the world about a November volcano exploding a lava of leaves.  This Friday (not because Hillary lost, but because ignorant, selfish, and hateful won), that November lava has been scorched raw and is now chilling into the hard obsidian of resolve.

That's how I feel on the inside.  My poem for that goes like this:



I pledge allegiance
to liberty and justice for all.

Looking at me, you wouldn't notice any hard shiny edges.  On the outside I look the same as I always have: an ordinary, middle-aged woman white woman.  You'd see me get in my late-model Mazda and know that I'm privileged to drive my own car, with enough time and money to decorate it with pink and green flower decals.  Even my bumper stickers are pretty ordinary:  two public school logos and a "Wag More, Bark Less" magnet.  (You might assume that means I love my dogs instead of owning cats.)

You wouldn't know that when I first left my husband and moved to London in 1991, I thought I'd cut my hair short, stop wearing teacher skirts and go butch to suit my new lesbian lifestyle.  After a lifetime of privilege I felt so safe, even as I altered my whole identity, that it never occurred to me that I might endanger myself with a style makeover.

As it happened, I was still mostly myself after a year in London.  I couldn't ever commit to the butch look, and eventually understood that I wasn't even a "real" lesbian--instead I'm a real bisexual who found the love of her life in a woman instead of a man.  So that ordinary, middle-aged white lady you see getting into her suburban Mazda is, invisibly to most, a bisexual woman in a same-sex marriage with two children conceived through artificial insemination. 

Unless I open my mouth, I'm pretty safe in this "new" America where my fellow citizens, emboldened by an ignorant, selfish and hateful winner, feel free to aggress. I'm not black, I'm not brown, I don't have an accent, I don't wear a hijab, I don't stand out.

So I'm opening my mouth.  Not in protest because my right to marriage is now endangered, although it is, and not because my worth as human being will be questioned, because it will, and not because my children's security will be compromised, because it may be.  I'm opening my mouth because it's not fair that I get to be invisibly safe as I go about my business, while whole populations of Americans are waking up worried about what ugliness lies ahead because of how they look on their morning commute, in their day at school, in the next weeks or months or year.

I'm unsure if this is any help.  I'm even a little unsure of my motivations here. I just feel like I don't want to be hiding right now, that--KABOOM--this country is not what I hoped, believed, and committed to on the day after the election in 2008.  I feel like I've been relaxing in safety for 8 years, here in suburban liberal Maryland with my white skin and my flowered Mazda, and that I have to get out of the car now and walk with some folks who are strangers to me.

And I don't have a poem for that yet.

The round-up is with Jama today.  Safety in numbers there, and maybe in baked goods.