April Poetry Month - Day 8 - Summer Afternoons

            Continuing with ideas from the book. This time, "Special Places".

             Remember to share:

Tabatha Yeatts has created a link to poems teachers and librarians can print for poetry month, titled "Poetry in The Halls". I'm grateful to be one of the poets!

Jama Rattigan has a post HERE with many poets' goals for April.

The Progressive Poem schedule can be found on the right!

Afternoon on The Roof

The town-grandparents’ house

offered a low, slanted roof,

the roof over the cellar door,

an invitation.

My friends and I kept 

an old chair to boost us up.

On lazy summer afternoons,

prescribed rest time,

we’d lie there sky-gazing,

whisper-giggling at our jokes,

naming the cloud animals,

safe in our secret place.

Linda Baie © 

April Poetry Month - Day 7

            Continuing with ideas from the book. This time, "Special Places".

             Remember to share:

Tabatha Yeatts has created a link to poems teachers and librarians can print for poetry month, titled "Poetry in The Halls". I'm grateful to be one of the poets!

Jama Rattigan has a post HERE with many poets' goals for April.

The Progressive Poem schedule can be found on the right!

At this post, Ruth Bowen Hersey shared a poem by Pablo Neruda lamenting why he has never made a broom. As most of us can connect, we, too, have rarely made anything that is needed around the house. We are proud when we can figure out how to build Ikea furniture, or how to clean out the vacuum, but rarely really "make" anything. It connected me to an old memory of more fun at a grandparents' farm. Those grandparents did everything, made butter and biscuits, kept sheep, sheared and used the wool, canned all the vegetables and fruits, and kept chickens and geese, sold the eggs, raised more. That's a short list! 

It’s Good to Have a Barn for Stuff

On the mountain in the backyard,

(really the tiny hilltop of the root cellar,)

I dragged the old flattop wagon up,

flung myself on and raced down,

into the grass,

again, then again, 

so many times it made a track.

This wagon came from old wagon parts

kept when a metal top had rusted out,

thrown in the barn, for someday?

These wagon parts might have been

coasted on by my dad.

My grandpa cut an old piece of wood to fit,

screwed on the wheel assembly,

a wagon for belly-flop riding.

like sledding in the summer.

Linda Baie ©