Poetry Friday: The Meadow Mouse

I've been working on a museum project, writing the text for the panels beside the exhibits. My client wants a conversational tone to the information and an emphasis on habitat.

Here's the text for the White-footed Mouse:

The White-footed Mouse lives in warm, dry forests and brushy areas near the edge of woods. These mice usually come out at night. They are good climbers and good swimmers. They drum their forepaws on hollow reeds to produce a musical, buzzing sound. Scientists have no explanation for this behavior. The mouse uses its keen eyesight and sharp senses of hearing, touch, and smell to locate food and avoid predators. Nuts, seeds, fruit and berries, small insects, and fungi make up the mouse’s diet. These mice nest in underground tunnels, brush piles, or rocky crevices.

Conversational, but a bit dry.

Then last night I was reading through Theodore Roethke's The Far Field and found this. It's why I love poetry.

The Meadow Mouse

1.

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking

Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,

Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick

Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,

Cradled in my hand,

A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,

His absure whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,

His feet like small leaves,

Little lizard-feet,

Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,

Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his bottle-cap watering-trough--

So much he just lies in one corner,

His tail curled under him, his belly big

As his head; his bat-like ears

Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles

When I come close to him

He seems no longer to tremble.

Read part 2 here.

Stop in at Libby Franke's blog, A Year of Literacy Coaching, for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

The Beast

National Poetry Month

Inspiration often comes at inconvenient moments--walking my neighborhood and I've forgotten my phone with it's memo-to-self capabilities, planting flowers in my garden with dirty hands and no pen nearby, in the middle of the night when I try to convince myself I'll remember in the morning. And then the phrase, the next scene, the image is gone.

The same is true in life. How often we miss the moment for a word or an act of kindness that will make a difference in someone's day. We let the opportunity pass, and the act that only you or I could do goes undone. And something is lost.

I'm learning to listen to that inner voice that prompts me to respond, whether it's with pen and paper or a kind word. Regret is harder to live with than failure.


The Beast

I came to a great door,
Its lintel overhung
With burr, bramble, and thorn;
And when it swung, I saw
A meadow, lush and green.

And there a great beast played,
A sportive, aimless one,
A shred of bone its horn,
And colloped round with fern.
It looked at me; it stared.

Swaying, I took its gaze;
Faltered; rose up again;
Rose but to lurch and fall,
Hard, on the gritty sill,
I lay; I languished there.

When I raised myself once more,
The great round eyes had gone.
The long lush grass lay still;
And I wept there, alone.

--Theodore Roethke