It’s been 30 days.  A poem and a post each day of the month of April.  I’ve fallen into a rhythm, finding spaces for the writing, surfacing ideas for poetry and posts.  I know this about myself, the habit of writing makes writing easier for me (not necessarily better, but easier).  So what will happen tomorrow?  Will I write anyway?

I was drawn to a photo of a circle today and the idea of a circle.  No beginning, no end.  Maybe the perfect metaphor for the 30th day of the 30-day poetry challenge.

Circle

 

Never-ending curve

beginning and end

indistinguishable

blended

whole

a hole?

Spots and blots

polka dots

rounded

rounding up

containing

all 360 degrees

Cycle

repeating

birth and death

water

air

never-ending curve

begins

where it ends

Circle

 

Douillard 2018

My students are busily curating their poems, selecting about 10 poems to publish in their own books.  They are working to revise and refine…and the poems are gaining depth as they try out new techniques and experiment with form and line breaks.

Here’s one Stone wrote about an engineer who was an accidental paleontologist!

The Secret Engineer

Deep deep underground was a secret engineer.
He never told anyone he saw a dinosaur
because he built a time machine.
There was a hot and blazing sun with loads of heat.
He was in the prehistoric time
He was the best mathematician, he made the best discovery.
With his engineering mind and his scientific brain his inventions were the
Best!

Stone

Rylan has been writing poems about softball.

Will She Swing?

 

Yellow with red stripes

resting in a leather open oval

waiting anxiously for the umpire to call out

STRIKE!

Fastball

Change up

Drop ball

Will she swing?

Rylan

And Sadie revised her poem about fire’s evil plot

Fire Plot

The fire hisses and cracks in its pen amongst the burnt and crisp logs.

Its angry arms reach up into the umber sky,

then shrivels down.

The fire sneaks up on pieces of marshmallow fluff, thinking of a plot to escape from the charred black pit and leap into the world.

Maybe to a hillside or a house, spreading fiery anger and sadness with it.

When it discovers the perfect scheme, it crackles and reaches into the dark, sending a swirl of smoke into the starry night.

Sadie

As April ends so does National Poetry Month. I know the power that poetry has on writers and thinkers and learners.  The sustained attention that results from 30-days of writing also has power.  I’m thinking about other ways to stoke the fires of writing for my students and myself, establishing a firm practice of writing that will take us beyond the end of the school year.  Wish me luck!