Welcome to Poetry Friday. It’s hosted by Irene at Live Your Poem.
I’m the Art Discovery volunteer for our 3rd-5th grade Academic Learning Classroom.
For December, we explored how candles are used in a variety of holidays. And they were shared for our annual Multicutural Day.
candles lit
across the cultures
peace in the world.
Happy Friday.
Happy Poetry.
Welcome to Poetry Friday. Today it’s hosted by Diane at Random Noodling.
Thanks to Diane, I got connected with a fabulous opportunity to create a response to art at the Spark: Art from Writing: Writing from Art. This was my first foray into this community.
When you sign up, you get to share a piece of art or writing and your partner responds to it. You have ten days to respond.
Tora Estep provided this sketch from her notebook:
When I asked Tora if the sketch had a title, she said no. So I sat with this sketch for awhile as well as asking some of my elementary students what they noticed. Most responded that she seemed mad or sad.
I kept coming back to the book THE LIBRARIAN OF BASRA. And then a thought formed about library books and the burning of them. I settled into writing this tritina:
I Watched
I watched as the flames
stretched upwards in the brittle night
Wondered who would save the books
The ancient, the sacred, the magical, all the books
licked by the flames, devoured by the flames
I watched in the brittle of the night
Laughter and then screams in the brittle night
as the words from the books
melted and died in the flames
Anger became my cloak as the flames grabbed the books in the brittle night
© 2015 Jone Rush MacCulloch all rights reserved
I am looking forward to participating more with Spark. I loved the process.
Happy Friday.
Happy Poetry.
Poetry Friday is hosted by Tara at A Teaching Life.
I am having a rough fall. Teaching, medical, world events, and anxiety makes it difficult to post consistently. When I found this poem on Facebook this week it was a perfect poem for me.
The Peace of Wild Things
BY WENDELL BERRY
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free
Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press.
Source: Collected Poems 1957-1982 (Counterpoint Press, 1985)
Wendell Berry reads the poem HERE.
And a photo that gives me peace:
Happy Friday.
Happy Poetry.
Check It Out 