Poetry Friday: Polar Animals

It's been a busy week and my brain is tired, so here goes with some silly, polar poems.

Please Remove Seal
Jack Prelutsky

PLEASE REMOVE SEAL BEFORE USING THIS PRODUCT,
the sign on the box clearly read.
I don't have a seal, but I'm taking no chances—
I'll toss out my walrus instead.


Narwhal
X.J. Kennedy

Around their igloo fires with glee
The Eskimos tell tales
Of Narwhal. Listen and you'll see
This unicorn of whales
Through frosty waves off Greenland's coast
Majestically advance.
And like a knight come forth to joust
Hold high its wary lance.



The More It Snows
by A. A. Milne

The more it
SNOWS-tiddely-pom,
The more it
GOES-tiddely-pom
The more it
GOES-tiddely-pom
On
Snowing.

And nobody
KNOWS-tiddely-pom,
How cold my
TOES-tiddely-pom,
How cold my
TOES-tiddely-pom
Are
Growing.

Be sure to stop by Anastasia Suen's blog, Picture Book of the Day, for other Poetry Friday posts.

Check Out These Blogs

Today is the first year anniversary (Blogiversary?) at Teaching Authors. The six children's authors who also teach writing are April Halprin Wayland, Carmella Martino, Ester Hershenhorn, Jeanne Marie Grunwell Ford, JoAnn Early Macken, and Mary Ann Rodman.

Stop by today's blog post and register for a free critique by one of the six bloggers. What a great giveaway to celebrate the blogiversary.

Over at Paula Yoo's blog, NaNoPiBoWriWee is getting ready to kick off. You write seven picture books in seven days. Okay, it's a little crazy, but it's fun.

If you're planning to join NaNoPiBoWriWee, check out Nancy I. Sanders Blogzone for some great preparation tips.

Write well!

Spring in my Backyard

Spring doesn't last very long in the deep South, but while it's here it's stunningly beautiful. I'm enjoying every minute of it.







Because I know that very soon my lovely garden will have a fight for its life with a jungle of weeds, briers, and searing heat. This prickly little vine is known as greenbriar. It can also be called bull briar, horse brier, and cat brier. It's such a monstrous nuisance people can't even decide on a single name or a consistent spelling. This little shoot may look innocent at the moment, but if it's not destroyed, it will soon grow straight up above everything around it until gravity pulls its nasty little stem downward into whatever grows nearby. The thing can grow up to twenty feet long and wrap itself in, around, and through every healthy plant within spitting distance.

Definitely a worthy antagonist.

First Reading

I had a delightful visit with students at Hannan Elementary School yesterday. With students and teachers ready for a break from testing, I had four attentive audiences. Well, except for when the loud speaker called for the second graders to come get their snow cones in the middle of their author visit. We whizzed very quickly through the rest of the book we were reading together. After all, it takes something pretty special to compete with snow cones!

The fourth grade classes agreed to try out my script on Columbus, Vespucci, and Waldsemuller from the reader's theater book. They were such great sports about it. Eight students agreed to read the parts in front of the group, even though they had never seen it before. They did a great job. And it was a good evaluation for me to see a first reading.

Another Polar Poem

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the Peary/Cook controversy. At some point research must stop and I must find a way to present this to middle-grade readers. The fact that it's still disputed a hundred years later makes me ask myself: What in the world am I thinking? I need more than a pick ax and a sextant to find my way through the morass! There is still a Peary camp. There's still a Cook camp. And they are still as diametrically opposed to one another as contemporary partisan politics. So, I'm taking a break from them and reading about S. A. Andrée, who tried to float over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. He didn't make it either.

Polar Explorer Salomon August Andrée (1897)
by Elizabeth Bradfield

O, terrible—silence over ice—
no panting dogs, no hissing runners,
no footfall to break it. Just the crack
and groan of its own awful straining
rising up.

You warm your hands at the flame
that lifts you. The balloon's silk
is a second sun, unsetting. You're always in its noon,
directly underneath its rippling light.

There's a red smear on one floe, white
bear loping away from the seal's meat.
There's a quick spout in a lead,
the whale's back there, gone.

When blizzards, no ground to fix
your boots to, just directionless swirl
and the compass' doubtful arrow.

Who else has breathed air this clear, crystals of it
hardening briefly in your lungs? Who else has so brightly
risen above the dangerous landscape?

And when you find that you are losing height,
when the earth calls you down to its own slogging,
when it's been decided that you've traveled long enough
as ghosts, silent and apart, you know
some disaster of hunger and cold awaits
—your bones' location to be a mystery for thirty years—
you know your limbs may no longer have the knack
of pulling, of recovery, of resistance, and you're glad anyway
to be mortal again, and stumbling.

Birthday Week

This is a week full of birthdays! Well, of course, lots of people were probably born this week, so you can all celebrate with us at our house. Birthdays include my daughter, my grandson, my best friend, my husband, and my daughter-in-law. That's a lot in one week.

In keeping with National Poetry Month here are a couple of birthday poems to celebrate.

The Birthday Child
By Rose Fyleman

Everything's been different,
All the day long.
Lovely things have happened,
Nothing has gone wrong.
Nobody has scolded me,
Everyone has smiled.
Isn't it delicious
To be a birthday child?


Birthday
by Louise Gluck

There was an apple tree in the yard –
this would have been
forty years ago – behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts –
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Poetry Friday: Explorers

This week my research for the reader's theater book on Explorers took me to the North Pole. I'm reading Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy Resolved by Robert M. Bryce. It was a story that caught the interest and ire of the entire country for years.

I've never been in a place that's extremely cold like the Poles. I don't like being cold, so it's hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to go there, especially more than once. But the explorers who once set foot in these frozen lands always wanted to go back. This poem by Mark Strand, captures the longing.

I Had Been a Polar Explorer
Mark Strand

I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.